Written by Sarah S. and Dalton S.
Our team kicked off the new year by coming together and watching the annual game reveal livestream. We call this annual event “Kickoff weekend,” where our team coordinates a variety of activities to further our understanding of the game over a short weekend. This year’s game, REEFSCAPE, consists of a cylinder tube-shaped game piece called “Coral” and a large kickball called “Algae” to fit the coral reef theme. The goal of this year’s game is to place as much Coral onto the Reef, located at the center of each half field. Teams can also score Algae by taking them off of the Reef and putting them into the Processor or the Net of each alliance’s side. As the Algae goes into the Processor, the human player aims to score it into the Net as well. As we enter the end of the match, robots gather in the middle of the field and attempt to hang from either deep or shallow Cages.
After tuning into the livestream, the students moved into a session of popcorn reading of the game manual to advance our understanding of specific scoring criteria and rules for the game. Having a sufficient understanding of the game, students split into alliances to run a human mock game in the cafeteria. The students were able to become the robots, and human players, as if they were playing an actual match. Each alliance is given time to strategize and then a short tournament took place to experience the game first-hand.
Different from last year, we created our weighted objective table the same day. The weighted objective table is a tool we use to figure out the importance of each way a team can score points in the game. After figuring out the importance of each task, the team voted on what we believed would be important for the robot to do and not do.
On Sunday of Kickoff weekend, it was finally time to put our new information to use! This year, we decided to let students split up into either the strategy or mechanical side for the day. The strategy team took a deeper dive (pun not intended!) into the game and discussed the differences between qualification and playoff matches, what the most elite robots will look like, what a robot can ignore and still be competitive, auto mode, and the robot will-do list. With this new information, they made a final decision on what our robot will need to do.
On the mechanical side, students started prototyping and explored how the robot could interact with the game pieces. Meanwhile, our amazing coaches and parents volunteered to help build a version of the field that we would later test our robot mechanisms on.
Overall, Kickoff weekend was a huge success and we hope to use all of our analysis of the game to have a smooth and exciting build season!
