Your first season, week by week

Before kickoff: four things you need

None of these are optional and all of them take longer than you expect, so start them in September rather than in the week after the game is announced.

1. Registered and paid. Registration opens months before kickoff and event slots fill. Being registered is what makes you eligible for anything else.
2. A space you can leave things in. A team that packs up the robot every night loses a quarter of every session. A locked cupboard and a table beats a nicer room you have to clear.
3. A control system. Two control hubs or a hub and an expansion, batteries, a charger, and driver station devices. This is the largest single purchase and it has lead time.
4. Money, or a plan for it. A first year typically runs $4,000–8,000. Work out the number before you commit to two events. The budget guide has the line items.

Kickoff weekend: read, do not build

The temptation on day one is to start cutting metal. Resist it for 48 hours. Read the manual as a team, build a scoring table and decide what you are and are not going to do. How to read a game manual covers the extraction, and turning it into a strategy covers the maths.

Rookie teams that skip this build a robot that does the most visually impressive scoring action rather than the most valuable one, and find out in February.

Weeks 1–3: build a drivetrain and prototype badly

Two things happen in parallel. One group builds a driveable chassis: nothing else, just something that moves under driver control with the control system wired properly. The other prototypes the hard mechanism out of cardboard, wood and zip ties.

The chassis is the priority. A robot that drives in week three gives you eight weeks of driver practice and autonomous work; a robot that drives in week eight gives you none, and driving is the cheapest performance improvement available to a rookie team. Picking a drivetrain is worth an hour before you commit.

Weeks 4–7: build the real one

Assign each subsystem to a small group with one named owner, and make the order explicit: the intake cannot mount until the chassis is final, autonomous cannot be tuned until the drivetrain stops changing.

Somewhere in here, everything will take twice as long as planned. That is normal and it is why the next section exists.

Weeks 8–9: stop adding

Set a hard date, two weeks before your first event, after which no new mechanism gets built. Whatever is not working by then is not going to be working at the event either, and the time is worth more spent on the boring half: wire management, fasteners, and an autonomous that completes nine times out of ten.

This is the rule rookie teams break most often and regret most reliably.

The last two weeks: practise and pack

• Drive. Timed, on real field elements, with the drivers who will actually drive. Cycle time improves faster here than anywhere else.
• Run your autonomous twenty times and write down how many completed.
• Finish the engineering portfolio. It is due at the event, not after it.
• Do an inspection dry run against this season's rules.
• Pack from a written list and check it twice. The pit checklist is a starting point.
• Charge every battery and label them.

What actually happens at your first event

You arrive early, you queue for inspection, and something on your robot fails it. This happens to nearly everyone and it is fixable. Then you play five or six qualification matches spread across the day, with judges visiting your pit between them.

Two things surprise rookie teams. First, how much of the day is waiting, which is why the pit is where the portfolio gets finished and the robot gets fixed. Second, how helpful other teams are: ask for a part, a tool, or advice, and you will generally get it.

You will probably not win. That is fine. The goal of the first event is to find out what breaks. Write it all down before you leave the building.

What rookies consistently get wrong

• Building before deciding what to build.
• One person doing everything, so nothing survives them being ill.
• No driver practice, because the robot was never finished.
• The portfolio written in the final week, from memory.
• Entering one event and discovering the season is over in November.
• No spare parts, so a broken $12 part ends the day.
• Nobody writing anything down, so year two starts from zero. Handing the team over is a year-one problem, not a year-three one.