My team’s first tournament is coming up on Nov. 2nd. Our robot is completed, but we don’t know what to do with the remaining time. We are only a middle school team and half of our team (excluding me and the builder) have never experienced a tournament. Is there anything that we should do/attempt in the final days until our first tournament?
Any advice will be immensely helpful in our team’s advancement, thank you.
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Practice driving.
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Improve your autonomous program (keep your current program backed up, in case your new program doesn’t work as well as your current program.
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Practice driving some more.
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Do you have an auton? If not, make a quick one. Might not be perfect or even good, but better than nothing. Always room to improve auton, get driver practice, improve engineering notebook, and make driver controls more intuitive. I haven’t yet been to a VEX tournament, but this is what we do in FTC, a similar competition. I would say that drive practice and auton are the most helpful things you could do.
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welcome to the forum!
Best used the time to practice practice practice… Also, tune the autonomous programs.
also, figure out what jobs each of the team members will have on competition day? Who is going to make sure batteries are properly charged? Who is going to manage schedule to make sure you get skills run in? Who is going to scout teams? Who is going to be on Drive team for the match? Who is going to talk to alliance partners before matches?.. tons of stuff to take care of.
It can be overwhelming, but you are doing the right thing right now asking how to prepare for your first tournament.
Remember to have fun, expect setbacks, learn lots, make new friends!
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Thank you, I will be sure to implement this in our work days ahead, and I will be sure to do the things you have so kindly suggested.
Thank you, I appreciate your positivity! 
You have already received some good advice, in addition to having a match auto and driver practice here are some other things I suggest
- Make sure your robot is ready to pass inspection. Nothing feels worse than starting off a competition by needing to chop things off your robot
- .Work on both programming and driver skills, You must be top 40% of both programming skills and overall skills to be eligible for the excellence award
- Make sure your notebook is up to date and meets all of the criteria on the engineering design rubric so that you have a chance at awards like excellence, design, innovate and others (if offered)
- Practice your interview. There are sample questions that are used in many tournaments in the RECF Guide to Judging
Good luck and have fun at your competition!
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If it were me I would practice driving, work on my autonomous, etc. During the one or two days before the competition, I would make a checklist of what I need to bring to the tournament.
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What I would think about is your goals. Do you want to win the tournament, win awards, or just qualify for states. For whatever you decide you go with what I think the best option would be from the below choices.
Tournament - You need to watch many strategy videos, Luke Does Robotics, and if you have a sister team do many matches and drill the first 10 seconds of driver and lock in your auto.
Awards - NOTEBOOK & INTERVIEW PREP
Qualify - Mainly look at skills and see what the top 10% in your region are looking like and add some to that for preparing for what you want your skills to look like. Then just do a lot of skills auto and driver skills lines to get it down to almost a science.
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In addition to everything already posted, I would recommend looking up past competition streams to try and find dominant strategies to use during matches. These streams can also be useful for finding the “skill level” of your opponents.
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I would say just do what @kmmohn said because you want to be as prepared before jumping straight in. Also, make sure not to make any big changes just fine-tuning and tweaking. You want to make sure that nothing is going to quit on you mid-match so try running different parts of the robot just continuously for minutes to make sure it will last under some circumstances where you only have a few minutes between matches.
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