FIRST Robotics - Seasonal Observations

Every FIRST Robotics season is an educational experience.  Obviously for the students, and this being a largely rookie team a great deal was learned.  But even we grizzled veterans keep on learning.  Sometimes the easy way, sometimes that other way.

I got a number of things wrong.  This is rarely due to pure stupidity on my part, mostly it comes from a misread of the omens and portents.  For instance, when the team decided early in the fall that a Week One event - i.e. the shortest possible build time - was a good idea I said sure, why not.  I failed to factor in a resurgent strain of Covid that hobbled our early build season.  Time lost in the early stages of build, when you are designing in CAD and doing rapid, effective prototyping, can never be made up.  On the tail end of build season we had to give up on one key mechanism that would have made us more competitive.

I also misjudged the level of competition at this early event.  Usually if you show up ready to play with a solid machine and kids who know how to drive it you will do rather well.  This time we saw most of the other teams turning up with more complex machines than ours, and they mostly had them mastered.  I think the difference is that there are many more "out of the box" solutions now than in years past.  If you don't mind buying your engineering answers - and this is rather Real World - you can get a really nice machine running faster than if you were inventing the wheel.  Or more accurately inventing something that has clever wheels in the correct places.

Additionally this year's game was quite similar to the last pre-pandemic one.  It is felt that FIRST HQ wanted teams who missed out on 2020 entirely to be able to take the effort they had put in on that similar game and carry it forward.  They did.

Other things I had a hand in were mixed results.  We promoted a number of 8th graders who showed promise.  Mixing cultures is always tricky, but overall this worked out well.  We were settling in to a new home.  It had pros and cons, but by the end of build season we were starting to get the place figured out.  There will continue to be storage and access issues, but the stumbling blocks we encountered can be understood and hopefully addressed.

Clear victories?  I'll claim a few.  I got the team a cordless rivet gun.  Man is that nice.  Although our robot was not a wonder of modern tech it sure was solid.  The quality of construction overall ended up being quite good.  Hence the actual Perfection of the pit crew.  There was simply not that much that could be broken.

We also did well with some grants.  One very nice one was predicated in part on our being a team that welcomes diversity.  We earned that one, going from our usual one or two girls on the team in our early years up to 8/25, with several stepping up to leadership roles.  We are also starting to find funding for various capital expenses.  When the school does not have things that can be reliably available to us we simply get and maintain our own.  This is the path forward to more sophisticated engineering, and of course the need to acquire, set up, maintain and cherish our own tools and machines is highly educational.

So we ended the season with a sub .500 record but a crew of kids who appear to enjoy robots, working and each other.  A good foundation to build on.