2012 Kickoff
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Hello all, and welcome to the 2012 FRC Build Season! This year's game is Rebound Rumble, which is roughly based off basketball, hence the name.
This year, Team 4 got Build Season started right by showing up an hour early, 6am on the west coast, and having a glorious breakfast available. If someone was, or could be covered in syrup or glaze we had it available for our team to keep trucking along after getting up at 5 in the early morning.
Once this year's technical difficulties were sorted out (I do still wonder what OSPREY is) we all watched and waited with bated breath for this year's game animation and the manual password. We started picking up on the not-so-subtle hints (why are they wearing basketball jerseys? hmmm… must be a water game) during kickoff. Once “Rebound Rumble” was finally announced everyone with a computer at hand was trying to type “!HotShot!KnowBalance!” without making any typos as fast as possible.
We broke up into groups by our process departments, Machining, Programming, Electronics, Design & Research, and a catch-all for Finance, and started reading through the rules. Every group approached this differently, but every group went into incredible detail. The game was done being announced at around 8:45am and we continued to all deliberate on the rules until noon in our small groups.
At noon we gathered up all the small groups and brought everyone together to make sure they were all on one page. Any discrepancies between what the groups thought the rules meant were ironed out, and some facts we had all missed (namely that the bridges are on double-hinges) were brought to light.
With everyone on the same page we broke for a well deserved lunch. We came back now organized in more diverse groups, and started to run “simulations” of the game. Over lunch we had created half-sized fields for everyone to act out the game on, and played the games turn-by-turn. There were a bunch of rules designed to make turn by turn play function similarly to the actual game though many were changed on-the-fly because our goal was just to see roughly how the game would work.
Our real goal was to generate “task lists” or “strategic objective lists” as some called them, which were simple listings of everything that you could do during the game. We figured out what you could actually do by having everyone play as robots and try different things. By doing this even with our relatively arbitrary movement rules we got an idea for how long it would take to do everything and how often we might need to do certain things.
With our newly-found knowledge of how the game played out we started sorting out our priorities in each group. We were going to try coalescing all of these into one master list to act as our team's objectives for the season, until we realized it was 3pm. We had been at our school, working for about 9 hours. On a Saturday.
Good luck, think hard, and we'll see Team 4 on Monday.