Today’s update will be a smaller one as today was focused on understanding the rules and we purposefully didn’t get into any action prioritization or robot mechanisms.

The team started out today before the livestream going through a quick presentation about some common game themes, the mechanisms used in them, and then a recent history of FRC games (thanks to @BordomBeThyName for the idea and some of the content). This was designed to give everyone, but especially new students, some base level knowledge as to know what to look back on for inspiration this year. The goal for day 1 was to have everyone understand the rules and scoring of the game such that tomorrow we can start coming up with our priority of actions.

After watching the livestream we started consuming the firehose of new information we received and filling out the kickoff worksheet Connor linked earlier. This was done in a combination of 7 different smaller groups and then we came back together at known checkpoints to form one main sheet as the whole team.

View the results of our group worksheet here.

Random Observations

• The balls take a while to be recycled out of the HUB (7 seconds for high and 5 for low)
• Having your intake handle bouncing balls will be very important, especially if primarily a high HUB shooter
• The vision target seems much harder to use than in previous years

Kickoff Retrospective

• Having the overview/history at first helped remind everyone of previous years and common themes to look for
• The worksheet and preformed groups helped set a structure to keep things focused
• We were still able to be efficient on Zoom; although it was less engaging, the use of breakout rooms made it easier in some ways for unique thoughts to be formed without being drowned out by the strongest voices
• Engagement could be improved by finding more ways to get everyone participating, especially when coming back to share in the larger group

Next Steps

• Everyone takes and passes the 1678 rules test (thanks 1678 for putting this together so quickly)
• Tomorrow we will:
  • Come up with the list of all the actions possible in this game
  • Prioritize those actions into a MoSCoW prioritization of what our robot will do
  • Start thinking about the prototypes our team wants to start on
  • Start thinking about what other subteam will need to start working on

Expect a much more in depth update tomorrow when we actually get into the details of what our robot will and will not do.