Doing things Again
It’s been awhile and we haven’t really kept up with blogging through our decision making and progress as a team. Documentation is key, and will be making a much bigger effort to do that.
What’s new?
The team has slowly but surely been working on improving ourselves over the summer, we still have regular meetings, and are trying a more measured and focused approach to the offseason which has been generally successful. There are still many things we would like to improve on but I do think this is our best offseason yet FRC-wise.
Offseason Training
This I think is by far our biggest success so far. We have had regular focused training for our three biggest needs on the team: Design/CAD, Electrical, and Programming. We have had weekly suggestions with more thought out lesson plans to help bring up all members up to a base level speed on different robot related understanding. This is a massive step for us as most of our training in the past has been during build season and done on the fly. Hopefully this gives our students a leg up heading into competition season with more confidence. We are just about to start our programming side of things, and will see how that goes.
Outreach Initiatives
We are looking to expand our outreach initiatives to become more effective at changing our community. We have targeted two goals, one local for developing more FLL teams in our area, and one for increasing our online presence. Progress has been slow but hope to execute on these plans.
Scouting System Development
We have a high emphasis on improving our scouting and strategy sections of our team. Most of our progress this offseason has been evolving our UI and what that looks like usability wise. 2024 was our first time using a website for all our data analysis/viewing, and I think we learned a lot about what not to do. I think our aspirations here are extremely high and we certainly won’t get even close to 50% of what we would like to do in our “endgame” for scouting and strategy, but any incremental improvements here are obviously good. It’s been tough as our team doesn’t have a lot of software interested students, so that has been a priority to develop.
Offseason Robot
We are going to try building an offseason robot to compete with. Hopefully this gives us a chance to develop skills even further and lets the team try new things in a low stress environment.
-Brennan