Hey everyone! I know this post isn’t very rich in substance but it’d be cool if everyone could comment what they’re doing for kickoff tomorrow. I hope everyone has an amazing time and I’m sure chief delphi will be lit up tomorrow.
I can start: My team is hosting a kickoff event at a local university. If you’re going to UMD tomorrow, I’ll see you then.
Oh, I thought this was a thread about 1678.
Hosting!
If you’ll be at Assabet Valley RTHS tomorrow, we’ll see you there!!!
We aren’t hosting other teams but were watching the stream on our newly build field XD. This will be followed by intense brainstorming and prototyping initial ideas
Watching these videos on a continuous loop
Battle of the Brains
Roboleague
My team will be hosting the only unofficial kickoff event in Chile 
<Insert Mike the WCD Engine Here></Insert Mike the WCD Engine Here>
I’ll be presenting a workshop tomorrow and serving as Kickoff coordinator for South Carolina’s event.
And then, you know, Robot in 3 Days because we weren’t doing enough. :rolleyes:
We’ll be playing FRC Kickoff Bingo… if my team gets me the hilarious bingo board file they showed me.
We’re going to be at an unofficial kickoff event at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. One of our mentors will be at an official event in Montreal to pick up our kit.
My team hosts a kickoff out of our high school. I’m running a workshop on HTML and CSS from 8-10 and then watching the broadcast. After that it’s lunch and helping out with the Rookie Quick Build and getting everyone a copy of the game manual.
Then? Go home and read the rules as we have intense strategy meeting on Sunday and a test over the rules to see who did their homework.
I won’t be there myself, but some reps from my team will be.
We will be hosting our annual unofficial kickoff for the Big Island teams.
Since the official kickoff is on another island we decided a few years ago to start hosting these. A great way for us to help, inspiration is everything!
The original kickoff video is at 5:30am HST so we try to let as many as we can get the last bits of sleep in… Though we all know the mentors were up watching it live .:yikes:
Our event runs from 9am to 6pm
There will be the kickoff video with breakfast.
Manuals will be printed and distributed to all in attendance.
Then rules review and discussion afterwards there will be a game rules test.
Afterwards teams will rotate through various workshops including but not limited to:
Field construction, game analysis, programming, mechanical design, prototyping, human robot, drive practice with previous robots and much more.
Still finishing up the workshop setup, later today we have a long session to get ready with a team building sleep over. (no actual sleep will probably occur)
Looking forward to great season, good luck to all!
Aloha
I get the honor of going to our local Kickoff at Garmin to pick up the KOP after watching the livestream before heading back to school. Our team is on our own this year but we are trying Kickoff differently by adapting the ideas of another team’s methods to our own. My friend and I might also reorganize our tool chest after we did a massive cleaning haul today.
The plan:
12:00-5:15: not sleep due to exitement
5:15-7:00 get ready/go to school/have manuals for me ready/go to the EWU kickoff in Cheney
7:30-TBD: kickoff
After that i become the connection from my team to the interwebs as nobody seems to use CD besides me. I also become the rules master (as i spend all day every day reading the manual to have it a part of my soul, and more because i am super good at computers and working with documents and expect me to find the answer before them.)
What my kickoff day looks like:
Arrive at Northrop (kickoff location) 7:45-8:00 AM
Help however necessary until kickoff is done around 11 AM
Run to library to print off a couple of copies of the manual
Run to the building where we’re running the GOFIRST Post Kickoff Event
Accept the delivery of 30-some pizzas for PoKo lunch
Get 100 people through lunch while speed reading the manual
Do a Q&A on the manual with those people
Run PoKo until 3:00
Run back to GOFIRST shop to start Ri3D
Do Ri3D until midnight.
There’s a lot of running involved, basically.
My team will be going to Grand Valley State University tomorrow for our local Kickoff. The stream viewing will be followed by many hours of intense strategizing. Nothing special really, but it’s still a lot of fun!
701 is having a kickoff in our shop and as their parent team, invited our esteemed guests 2085 and 5496. We’ll have lots of food, lots of rule reading, and no building or prototyping until Monday. Saturday is all strategy planning, our WHAT, and Sunday is all mechanical ideas, our HOW. There’s going to be lots of discussion over the weekend, and a heavy use of weighted objective tables!
We’ve given up on doing the official kickoff event, as our local only allows 10 people per team, which splits the team up for the big day and keeps us from hunkering down with the rules and ideas until everyone’s back together. We’re sending Lester (a mentor) to get the KoP and print out several sets of rules (he’s employed by NASA Stennis, one of our sponsors and host of the local official kickoff, so it all works out).
Instead, we’re hosting our own unofficial kickoff. We invited a number of teams, and our two rookie protegee teams, 5953 NOLA Bots and 5971 Raider Robotics, will be joining us for our most formal game requirements analysis to date. We’ll start with a continental breakfast as we watch the kickoff video, then do some general around-the-room discussion bordering on brainstorming to get initial impressions and identify key questions to find in the rules.
Then, we’ll break up into 6-9 groups to read sections of the rules (by topic, not rule number). We will be sure to spread out so each group has at least one veteran and three rookies, one from each team. These groups will “work through” a lunch of pizza, then we’ll come back about 1 or 2pm as a big group to share the key rules and begin brainstorming possible game strategies. Our brainstorming is intended to provide not only the strategy that **our **teams might use, but also as a baseline to evaluate strategies. That should take us to about 3-5pm, when everybody goes home.
About two hours later, after home-cooked meals and showers, our leadership and strategy team (mostly students, a few mentors) will come back together to evaluate strategies and get us down to a short list to develop for presentation to the team at our next session on Monday evening.
During most of this, we plan for some of the mentors to break away and start building field elements. Hopefully the rain will end before noon tomorrow! (Note to self - El Nino year, get paint or treated lumber for wooden field elements that will be stored outside!)
I’m gonna head to 624’s kickoff at their school at 8:00 AM, and stick around the whole day till probably 9 PM, maybe later depending on how things go. Of course, going out to get lunch at some point so we can vent our hype for the game outdoors for a bit.