Are you ready to put your team to The T.E.S.T. (Team Experience & Skills Training)? If so, join us for this year’s game, ZONED OUT
ZONED OUT is a game of ZONE control, using RINGS & ORBS to help claim ZONES and gaining bonus points for having ZONES connected at the end of the MATCH. Whoever scores the most points by the end of the match wins!
See the links below to get the information teams will be looking for to being their build season:
Game Reveal: ZONED OUT Reveal Comic Book Video (Source Comic)
Manual (1.0.0): ZONED OUT Game Manual
CAD Files/Drawings: ZONED OUT CAD & Drawings
RING Assembly: RING Assembly Document
AprilTag Information: Rapid React AprilTag Documentation
For future updates (such as manual/rules updates) to this program throughout the semester, stay tuned in this thread.
Registration is open TODAY, and will continue to be open until October 22th. Please fill out this Registration Form if you would like to register for our program! Teams have all semester to work at your team’s pace, so fear not, since many other teams in this program do not start their T.E.S.T. season until later in the fall!
Each FRC team can register up to 3 The T.E.S.T. teams, with the cost breakdown below:
First Team = $150 | Second Team = $50 | Third Team = $30
We have 2 days to offer teams for competition. Saturday, December 10 | Sunday, December 11.
We currently have a total of 13 teams, which will likely split to 7 on Saturday and 6 on Sunday. We’d love to have 8-10 teams per day, so if you’re interested, please reach out to me or sign up directly using the Form!
FAQ
I want to learn more about this program (The T.E.S.T.)
The T.E.S.T. (Team Experience & Skills Training), previously called Turtle Trials, is a program that was very much inspired by both OCCRA out of Michigan and BunnyBots out of the PNW/Chesapeake regions. We wanted a way to offer the same effective in-context training experience for FRC teams in our area (FIRST Upper Midwest). This program mirrors a full season of FRC starting from kickoff, moving into an extended build season, and finishing off as a competition in December at the end of The T.E.S.T. season.
We had a fantastic pilot season last year with the teams that were involved! Check out this thread if you want to know how that season went!
How do I fit this program into my team’s preseason meeting schedule?
The thing that drives people away from a program like this is thinking they have to be ready to start on the day of kickoff. You can start your “The T.E.S.T. Season” at a point in your preseason that works best for your team (example below). You can also decide how simple or complex of a robot you want to make depending on how often you meet during the season. These games are meant to have simple game mechanics with an emphasis on strategy.
2491, NoMythic, is a great example of a team who participates in this event and fits it into a schedule that works best for them. They use the earlier part of their fall season for recruitment and basic training, and then “premier” The T.E.S.T. to the team once they have been trained and established later in October, instead of the original October 1st reveal date.
Another way teams can approach this program is by doing all their traditional fall training for the majority of their fall preseason, then using the last 2-3 weeks as a “condensed season” where they meet as often as they would in the build season to simulate what that time commitment would be like for new students who have never participated in FRC before. At the end of that 2-3 week period, they then have a competition for their teams to attend and get practical competition experience.
Does this replace offseason events?
No, we believe that traditional offseason events and The T.E.S.T. accomplish different things. For most FRC teams, they only make slight modifications or small changes to their robots prior to competing at offseason events. The events themselves allow teams to see a close relationship to what a traditional FRC event looks like (since they will often compete on a real field), as well as giving great drive practice to potential new drivers for their team.
The T.E.S.T. leans on what is lacking from traditional offseason events with the entire path of creating a robot from scratch. This gives teams the opportunity to train their students on their kickoff and brainstorming process with a game they’ve never seen before, making the experience more authentic to the real thing. When doing a similar exercise for a game that already exists (say for the purposes of making an improved robot for an offseason event), you already know the most optimal path to design a robot because of the large sample size to take inspiration from.
What makes The T.E.S.T. different from FRC offseason events?
To us, the biggest difference is that The T.E.S.T. allows you to hold a “kickoff” day where you can practice your team’s brainstorming and decision making process for the rest of the season. Teams can do this with old FRC games, or even to the most recent FRC game if the goal is to make a new version of their robot, but where that comes short is that there are direct examples of robots that already accomplish that exact task. The T.E.S.T. allows them to truly think of original ideas for a game no one has seen before, very much like the start of a real FRC season would go.
There are a few other key differences between how traditional FRC offseason events and The T.E.S.T. events run. Below are some of the biggest differences between the program offerings.
- Smaller 27’x30’ field
- Drive teams must rotate in qualification matches
- Robots have a speed cap (cannot be faster than 10.5 fps)
- 2 v 2 tournament format
- Round Robin playoff format
- Lower build quality expectations (think functional prototype robot or Everybot)
