Lessons Learned
What we learned our Rookie Year.
April 2019
Viola High School competes in FIRST Robotics Competition.
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Lesson one
As we went through the rookie process, we learned many things. We were challenged by the vast amount of material and rules. We were overwhelmed by the time frame and didn't have a lot of knowledge coming into kick-off in January. The first thing we recommend that any team does is read the entire game manual. There is a lot of information that we didn't have a heads up about. No one told us there was a six-week build window is one example. We got our Kit of Parts on a Saturday, and didn't schedule our first build meeting until the following Thursday. We should have started Sunday. Once we realized there was a build window we and we had a deadline we really had to learn to delegate.
Senior 2019
“I think we learned a lot about teamwork and everyone needing to have a job. It started out just as a class project and we treated it like a group project. Let the one who knows what they are doing do all the work. That backfired when we realized there was way more work than one or two people could do. We had to step up and everyone do their part.”
Lesson two
One of the big things we learned was to delegate and plan ahead. By putting different people in charge of different parts instead of turning everything into a group decision, we were finally able to make some headway. We had several people that wanted to program. We only had one person actually IN the programming class. It got to the point that he was coming to every meeting and having to spend time asking "Should I do this or should I do that." Our mentor finally told him that he was in charge of the program and he did not have to ask permission to change things. If the others wanted to have input into the program, they could make suggestions, but he was the final say. Our build team had multiple projects going on at once and kept getting distracted. One of our mentors stepped in split us up into different tasks. That made everything work out much better. In the end we ended up with a driveable chassis in the bag ready for competition. We left everything else out and continued to work on it.
Senior 2019
“I learned a lot about teamwork and I learned that anything is possible. I mean, we built a robot in six weeks! We were so overwhelmed we never thought we’d finish, but we pulled it together. I only wish we hadn’t started this program my senior year.”
Lesson three
Do not sweat the small stuff. We spent way to long at our competition working to get the robot perfect before inspections. We came in with a driveable chassis in our bag and a bunch of stuff to work on and wire up. We got so wrapped up in getting it perfect we were 8 hours into the day before we got inspected. It was ridiculous and crazy. Your first year's design should be simple and easy to reassemble at the competition. We spent a really long time working on our bumpers. The best way to not sweat the small stuff is to ask for help. There were so many teams that helped us with our bumpers and our lift when we got to the competition. We should have asked for help sooner!
Junior 2019
“I love building stuff, but I’ve never gotten to take that stuff and compete with it afterwards. It’s one thing to rebuild a motor and drive the vehicle afterwards. It’s a whole other thing to build something and get to compete with it, get to really put it through its paces and see how it measures up to other people’s work.”
Lesson four
There is a steep learning curve the first year. You come in very overwhelmed with no idea what questions to ask or what help to ask for. You finish the year feeling like you ran a marathon. However, coming out of our rookie year we feel very confident that we learned enough to do better next year. The conversations and strategy sessions planning for NEXT year were probably the greatest thing that came out of this experience. The first year you survive. Hopefully in year 2, we'll compete.