My team,2930, has made it to the PNW district champs and we have 6 hours of free time before qualification matches start. We were wondering what other teams do for productive, robotics related time killers?
Practice field and practice. That is all.
See if any other team needs help.
Check out other robots, make friends with people from other teams!
Another thing you can do if your team lets you leave the stadium in groups is check out the surrounding area, survey restaurants, if you’re at a university then you can look around the college too.
Another thing that is a lot of fun is creating cheers for your team, my team had an awful lot of fun doing that while waiting for doors to open at regionals.
2910 does pit scouting, strategy planning, scheduling, team bonding with games and movies at the hotel, button making, and robot work in that time. Remember there’s no such thing as downtime, just wasted time. There’s always something you can be doing to benefit your team either at the event or in the long run. We also work on safety and evacuation plans. Hope this helps!
P.S. Thanks for hosting the GP event and congrats on the Blue Banner! Looking forward to seeing you guys at PNW Champs.
Quotes like these make me wonder why I’m on chief delphi procrastinating instead of doing my physics homework.
BBTAN
All hail the mighty Emoji ball to fill in that dead time while the field is under repair!
I do the same thing. . . whoops!
Never have I seen a more accurate quote on CD
Add LED’s to the robot that tell the driver the state of the robot.
Do the colors change as you cross state lines? What good does the robot telling me it’s in Virginia do?
No, no, no. It’s all wrong. It’s the original state of the robot where it was built (provinces acceptable for places outside the US). The LEDs should be lit in a way to be able to read the state/province.
For our bot, it’d be “CT” (if we had this “free time” you speak of).
Does anyone have suggestions for kids who aren’t working in the pit? Pit kids are easy to keep occupied during practice day, but the students in the stands are not. I can’t reasonably expect every student on my team to be at a level where they can help other teams (and I don’t think I want to crowd the pits with every student anyways).
Haven’t implemented these, but it’s on my list:
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Pit scouting. Not “are you arcade drive or tank drive?”* but actually looking at their pits for things they’re doing better than you are.
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Exploding Bacon had (and may still have) a policy where each person had to meet someone new at the event and learn something about them. I know some really great friendships started that way.
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Up here, Cyber Blue does a board with photos of all the teams at the event with their number. This would require getting someone to a Walgreens to print off, but it is a useful memory jog that could keep a couple people busy for a while. (Obviously, not implementing this one here because it’s already being done.)
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A team literally asked us this at Perry Meridian. I won’t hate on another team, but I really believe that’s about the most useless data to collect.
^^This resonates with me:] :]