Happy Kick Off 2025!
Our new game was just revealed. Let's submerge ourselves into what our kickoff event looked like!
Isabel S.
Last Saturday, our team was teeming with excitement to learn the new game for this season.
Each year, we host a kick-off event in our facility to watch the reveal of the new game. This year, the game is REEFSCAPE presented by HAAS. This is a large event attracting team members, mentors, parents, and even some alumni. Then, as soon as the game is revealed, we "DIVE" in!
Here's a link to the new game so you can take a look too!
To energize our next generation of young engineer minds, mentors, and alumni alike, we all dove into a delicious pizza lunch, everyone chatted about their thoughts on the game and potential strategies.
After watching the reveal and filling ourselves up with fuel, we dissect the game rules to answer any questions we may have and clear up any confusion. This sometimes brings up potentially new strategies that we didn't think were possible, or on the other hand, eliminates a possible one.
Once we have a handle on the game's rules, we move into scoring and strategy. Our student leaders lead this to encourage more student participation in the brainstorming. Students bubble with excitement as they share their various ideas about how to score the highest amount of points, in the least time possible, and what objectives they need to focus on in robot function to earn them. That wraps up what we did on Saturday, but students and mentors returned on Sunday to work on design ideas for the robot during their first architecture meeting.
The architecture meeting was full to the brim with many ideas. Students took turns at the beginning of the meeting explaining their ideas of different mechanisms we could use for various tasks, as outlined in our strategy planning on Saturday and drawing them out on the whiteboard. Then, we discussed our thoughts about them: what we liked, what we didn't like, and also how it would fit in on the robot structure amongst the other mechanisms needed. One obstacle was having to piece together the different functions, which posed some challenges. After getting a grasp of what we wanted to accomplish, we formulated a list of things that needed to be built, made with CAD, or prototyped to put together our plan, which was divided up amongst students. Walking out of that meeting, we had put together a game plan to tackle this year's challenge.
We are so excited for this new game, and we cannot wait to see what it will bring!