Strategy

When forming a FTC team it is wise to have a strategy plan.

Strategy is used with building your robot, driving/ competing with the robot, building a business plan and selecting which tasks to do on the field.

The Purple Protons made a strategy plan for our team.  The first thing we do is Plan, then Prototype, Build, Test, Reflect and Modify.

When planning on how to build our robot, “Bob”, everybody on our team had a different idea, so after we talked about all our ideas we voted on them and the top three we would prototype.  Planning is important! You don’t want to just start out prototyping with no idea what you are doing or you will have too many ideas and waste time.

Prototyping is useful to visualize the idea your team has.  On our team, we used the cad program CREO, legos, cardboard models and drawings.  We prototyped to help see the most successful ideas to build.

 We then used our most successful prototyped ideas to build the robot. Once you have prototyped something you have an idea of how you want to go after building.  You might want to follow the prototype or maybe you learned some things and want to build it differently.

After the robot or mission section is built the next thing to do is test.  With testing you want to try every aspect of what you built.  It is very helpful to write down specifically what you want to test and to have a team member record the specific results.  You may also want to video tape or take pictures of your tests.

One you have the data from testing, the thing to do is reflect and talk about what went right or wrong and how to fix it.  Once you know how you want to fix your robot, you need to modify it, and then repeat the whole cycle.

Good luck to your team and make sure you have a strategy!


The Purple Proton Blog Team (Evelyn)