New Year, New Game!

Our team was so excited for the reveal of the new game, and we needed to do some preparation before the season officially kicked off. Stryke Force hosts an event called "mock-kickoff," which resembles what a kickoff looks like. We take one of the past FRC games, and we watch the game reveal video, discuss any questions we have about the game, start planning the strategy, and mock up a potential blueprint of the robot. This is a great opportunity for new students to get a grasp on how everything works, and also a chance for student leaders to test-run guiding the discussion.

This year, we decided to do the mock kickoff based on the 2020 game, INFINITE RECHARGE, giving our team an opportunity to practice breaking down a new game from the reveal video and the manual. We were able to create a great discussion, preparing us for this year's game reveal on Saturday.

This past Saturday, we held our kickoff event in the Stryke Force facilities for the reveal of this year's game REBUILT™ presented by Haas, which is simultaneously done around the world. For those unfamiliar with the term kickoff, this is where we gather for the reveal of the new FRC, the high school team's game for the year. Before this event, very little detail was revealed about the new challenge, except for the name of the game and a trailer, which typically gives away the theme of the new objective.

Here's a link to this year's game video:

Once the new game trailer is released with the challenge, we waste zero time getting to work. Part of our kickoff day includes first breaking down the game and answering any questions that we may have. This clarification further enhances our understanding of how points are scored and determines which strategies are legal, allowing us to start brainstorming our strategy to score the most points in a given match.

After the questions are addressed, we transition into strategy. This portion of the event is led by the student leaders to encourage our students to work together and problem solve. First, we start by creating a list of what functions we want our robot to perform, down to the basics, hence how the first item on our list is always "move!" From brainstorming this list, we are able to prioritize what functions are the most important to include in our robot, so our original design ideas can be as precise and simple as possible, to avoid complications.

From strategy brainstorming, we transition to robot architecture. This part of the kickoff is often the shortest on the day of, because we continue the discussion the following day during our designated architecture meeting. We begin this portion by giving every student the spotlight to briefly sketch a robot blueprint that they believe will house all the functions and also act most efficiently. By having students share ideas, we eventually come to a general conclusion about the bare skeleton of the robot. From that point forward, our team gets straight to work until our first competition!

We cannot be more excited about the new game and stay tuned for what we create to tackle this year's challenge!