As the 2023-24 Full Volume season comes to a close and we eagerly await the results of Worlds and the official release of the 2024-25 Rapid Relay challenge mechanics, I thought it might be a great time for a retrospective on Full Volume. This was my first year coaching a team after watching from the sidelines as a parent for the prior two seasons (Pitching In and Slapshot) and seeing it from this new perspective sheds a whole new light on things!
I’m interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on Full Volume. What were your first impressions? What were the Pros and Cons of this year’s challenge and how did those match up to your initial expectations? What were you/your team’s biggest lessons learned that you’ll apply to the future?
Here were mine:
First Impressions
My initial impression when we saw the Full Volume reveal at Worlds was “This is definitely designed to force cooperation in the Teamwork challenge”. While Slapshot was an awesome game it was apparent to me as an observer that in many cases a near max score could be achieved by a single robot, with the exception of the arm extension. So teams that felt their robot was superior would just tell the perceived inferior robot to go in the corner and extend their arm and just stay out of the way. I thought the design of Full Volume, the number of field elements, the randomized supply zone, the varying bonuses, etc. would mean that it would be almost impossible for a “bully bot” situation.
Pros
- The incredibly varied scoring mechanisms I feel lent itself to some super interesting robot designs, forming almost “classes” of robots with heavy design variations within each class.
- For the most part, it did seem as though the game design did force more collaboration for team challenges, which I really liked. Seeing teams seeking out their paired bots to strategize was really cool.
- I also felt as though the game design forced you to have to approach scoring/pathing strategy differently for each of the 3 match formats (teamwork, driver skills and autonomous skills).
- I also liked how goal zone scoring had a sort of “penalty” for non-uniformity, which forced robots/drivers to have to take an extra beat to make sure they didn’t mix colors.
Cons
- I feel like the red blocks were kind of a waste/missed opportunity. They seemed almost like a gimmie to just “knock over” and almost not one attempted to score them in a goal because it simply wasn’t the smart move. I think putting the red blocks into the supply zone would have been a neat idea to earn points and serve as a tradeoff/extra challenge for parking.
- While I can appreciate the idea around the supply zone being “randomized” each run and that meant you couldn’t program/design around a specific layout…I think it played too large a role in how well or poorly a run might go and I’m not a fan of leaving stuff up to “chance” in a competition like this when kids work so hard and the literally position of a single block could throw things off.
- Similarly, scoring blocks into the goal zone was such a crapshoot in terms of how they would fall/rest. One block dump of 5 blocks could result in a level 2 or even 3 bonus when another could only earn level 1 simply on how the blocks fell.
- Maybe it was just me seeing things from the coaches perspective but I felt like there were a TON of bots at local competitions that simply didn’t work at all or were shedding pieces left and right during a match. This is super frustrating for both teams…not sure of the best way to prevent that from happening but just something I noticed.
- I liked the introduction/return of the Excellence Award!
Lessons Learned / Takeaways
I loved the challenge overall and really enjoyed coaching a team. We did a lot of iterative design work over the course of the season but I think we kicked the can of autonomous too far down the road and could have invested more time and energy into that. In 2024-25 we’ll definitely better balance our effort on both driving and autonomous. I also think I could have done a better job coaching the team around maintaining the Engineering Log; perhaps carving out a dedicated time slot at each practice to document what was done that day.
Looking forward to everyone’s opinions on Full Volume and we’re excited to see how Rapid Relay tests our skills in 2024-25!