Short-term Post-Mortem Talks

By Bhanaviya, Cooper, Paul, Aaron, Ben, Jose, and Trey

Task: Begin analyzing our performance at the Allen qualifier

It’s officially been a week since our first qualifier at Allen. Although we succeeded in qualifying there’s still a lot of work to be done before it we’re ready for the regional championship. Before we could begin any preparation for regionals, we needed to start off by analyzing our performance at Allen. To do this we created a SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis.Today was simply a short-term version of this analysis and there will be a separate post detailing our comprehensive post-mortem analysis as well as other post-mortem posts for our build and code subdivisions.

We started off by analyzing our performance at judging. In the past, timing is an issue we’ve struggled to nail down during judged presentations. As such, this year we worked to make our presentation as concise but thorough as possible. During the actual presentation, while we hit the 5 minute mark there were other areas in which we could have been improved - particularly, our robot demonstration and our ability to explain our build decisions with calculations. To solve this, we plan to design a research poster for regionals which explains our mathematical reasoning for every aspect of the robot. The poster will allow us to allude to our calculations during both presentations and pit visits. As for robot demo, it is more a matter of being prepared with working controls which is an issue we will cover in our long-term post-mortem.

On the short-term, we also plan to better organize our bill of materials which will streamline our process of building our new robot. For reference, TomBot is our current robot. Before regionals, we plan to build a similar circular-chassis based robot but with more custom built parts which we plan to design using our new CNC mill.

On the issue of drive practice our solution is simple, effective and fully on-track with the Iron Reign way: double it and try not to break the robot. In all seriousness, the only way to resolve lack of drive practice is doing more of it. Part of this includes documenting our driver practices with statistics for us to better analyse our progress (or lack of thereof).

The final issue we discussed during today’s post-mortem talks was how we plan to organize our schools qualifier on December 14 . Although this isn’t related to our performance at the Allen Qualifier, our experience at the tournament allowed us to better understand what needs to be done to get all 4 of our teams ready to host a 31-team qualifier. Part of this includes all members registering for roles as well as ensuring that we have monitors, playing fields, and enough adult volunteers to pull off the whole event.

Next Steps:

Over the course of next week’s meeting, we will finish our post-mortem talks and will continue our preparations to host the Townview Qualifier. In addition, we will also detail our SWOT analysis on this blog when our post-mortem talks are finished.