Happy kickoff everyone!
As always, it arrived after a wait that was unbearably long but felt like no time at all. It's build season again, y'all.
As always, it arrived after a wait that was unbearably long but felt like no time at all. It's build season again, y'all.
The Broadcast
1678 Hosts a local kickoff event for teams in the greater Sacramento area, so we all met up at the DHS theater at 8am on Saturday morning, ready for the season to start. We all watched the kickoff broadcast together, picked up our KOP, and then headed across campus to get the season underway.
The Rules
Our strategic discussion starts the same as everyone's does (hopefully) - by reading the rules. While most of the team reads the rulebook, student leadership writes a rules test. Every student has to take the test and pass with at least 85%, although they are allowed to retake the test as many times as it takes. This requirement makes sure that everyone on the team understands the details of the game, and helps keep the rest of our discussion on-track.
The Kickoff Sheet
The first step of 1678's kickoff is to fill out our "Kickoff Prompt" document, answering a few generic questions about the game. The team was split into 18 groups, each of roughly 5 students and 1 mentor. Each group was assigned to focus on one question of the prompt, and was also responsible for filling out as complete a list as possible of every legal action a robot can take. A copy filled out with every group's combined answers is attached below.
Note: this document was collated after kickoff for clarity on this blog.
Note: this document was collated after kickoff for clarity on this blog.
kickoff_prompt_synthesis.pdf |
The "Whats"
Using the answers from the kickoff document, we started narrowing down on the functional requirements of the 2023 robot. The first step was to lock in and cross off the obvious yesses and no's. After the easy wins came the discussion on more contentious, the biggest of which was whether or not to pick up tipped cones. At the end of the day, the board looked like this, with checks marking repeat answers.