Our team wasn’t able to win the school scrimmage and therefore can’t go to the world qualifier in my country, meaning we are basically eliminated this season. However, there are about 4 months before world and our team should still be able to use our school’s robotics lab.
What things should our team do to help us improve in vex for future seasons?
You should e x p e r i m e n t. Build different drivetrains and lifts.
My team had a similar situation when waiting for the new competition to be released and what we did during that time was teaching each other the skills of the other teammates. What I mean by this is the builder teaching the programmer how to build, the programmer teaches the builder how to program code, etc. The best part about this is that it improved the skills of our teammates and created a better bond between each other. At the same time we made multiple different chassis designs to get ready for the next competition.
it is very early to be in the off season already, there are still tons of state qualifying events you could probably attend, but if for whatever reason you can’t, then use this time to improve your skill. have everyone practice their jobs, improve your build quality, your design quality, your programming quality, and you’ll be more competitive next season.
You could go to a signature event if you guys are crazy. However, I would just keep working on the robot, and perfecting very part of the programming, build, etc. in order to understand the limitations of construction. That way, you get more knowledge for build and programming tips for next year, and just in case your sister team drops out, you could switch in for them.
keep building and keep going. Build for a previous game or continue building for this game anyway
Some people go to Signature events just because they are fun (like the Kalahari Water Park). All competitions will help give a team more experience in both competition, sportsmanship, and interviewing.
As others have said, experimenting with mechanics and programming various examples are areas which will pay-off benefits next season. Here are some things I would recommend to my own teams in your situation:
• Build a simple drive base, perhaps even the Clawbot (if you have the Clawbot kit) as a test platform, or use your current drive base if it works.
• Get the new vision sensor and learn how to program it
• Perhaps, learn to use and program the gyro. There will be a new one eventually, but it will probably work similar to the legacy one, so knowledge will probably be transferrable.
• Learn how to use and program pneumatics.
• Try out various drive: mecanun, X-drive, holonomic, “kiwi” “H-drive” or any of the myriad of names that different drive systems get. Set up a criteria to make comparisons of the different drives.
• Ambitious? Learn PROS
• Learn about schedule tools, like the Gnantt chart, for next year’s notebook
• Learn about decision-making tools for next year’s notebook.
Some context: Ryan and I are based in Asia, thus travelling to competitions amongst different countries is a bit of a nightmare for schools in our region. Usually, the school does one or two regional tournaments that qualify them for worlds. But schools that have a decent size number of teams can’t necessarily bring all of them, so they usually have these scrimmage events to determine who to send. My team certainly went through this process.
@Ryan_4253B, I’m not sure if we met at RoboRumble. Are you not participating in Formosa? Given how big the event is, I’d use the opportunity to see the competition itself and look/learn from the other teams there. Since it’s being hosted at your school, you have a unique opportunity to be able to watch the event.
I also agree with the others in terms of experimenting. I know you guys have a lot of equipment at your disposal, put it to good use! Experience is an important factor that’ll help with future competitions.
Learn to code. best choice I ever made. If you already know c++ pick up another language or get really good at c++. If you have a drivetrain laying around use that to learn how to code different turns, PID controllers, vison sensor tracking, odometry, macros. Even if you have a programmer it is super helpful to know what is going on code-wise. Experiment and when you come back next season you will have a library of functions to use and a skill set that will take you far. And I take it from your forum bio that you don’t know how to code so now is a good time to change that bio to “do anything”
To build off of that, I’m pretty sure I saw something on YouTube where somebody made a code robot. It’s basically an incredibly simple robot with th bare minimum structure needed and loaded with sensors so u can test ur code.
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