The Strategy Team

A message from Jordan and Eric, our Strategy group leaders:

Strategy tells the team what the robot will accomplish. We then bring our ideas to the technical groups (Mechanical, Electrical, and Programming),so they can bring them to life.

This year, we are designing a playbook. We divided the book into 3 sections: autonomous plays, offensive plays, and defensive plays.This way, we can prepare ourselves with a tangible tool for virtually any situation.

We are also currently composing and revising scouting sheets. We are watching videos of last year's competition at www.soap108.com, and using these sheets to judge the robots accordingly. This will help familiarize ourselves with other teams the day of the competition. This is especially useful, because since it is Team 1676's rookie year, we don't really know what to expect from some of the other teams.

We have constructed a Round Scouting Sheet, a Pit Scouting Sheet, and a Consistency Scouting Sheet.With this sheet, we made a scouting database using Microsoft Access. We took the sheets and transformed them into a series of forms. Scouting members can easily make entries into these forms, and the entries are automatically logged in a spreadsheet. These entries can then be sorted or searched for with great ease.

What we'll make sure to do next year: Well, we certainly won't waste any time. The first thing we need to do is to make everyone in the group experts on the manual. We found we don't really have time to keep referring to the manual or to Chief Delphi. We have to stay focused, and make sure we are constantly occupied, so we'll stay on-task. But, on the other side of the coin, we've found out that sometimes it's better to clear our heads. Our strategies are just as good when they are developed over pizza, or with Billy Joel in the background. Strategy is versatile like that- the environment can be casual, and we can still accomplish tasks. For instance, some of our tasks each member did at home; some days, we just needed to be home to clear our heads. But it's still important to make use of the valuable meeting time... the 6 weeks will come and go in no time.

Advice for rookies: Don't be intimidated by teams that have been around for years and years. Your ideas are as good as theirs. Share ideas with other teams, and get to know what others are thinking that's what Gracious Professionalism is all about. And also, make sure you get organized early. We were kind of 'slacking off' for the first week, and then it caught up to us. Make sure you are constantly giving yourself projects to keep yourself busy. But by the same token, don't be too busy (see above). There's always something else the sub-team will be doing to cement your strategies and organize them. Strategy is extremely important in competition. Another team can build an arm that telescopes 8 miles, but have terrible strategy, and they won't get very far.