I learned a lot from our first year of robotics: How important it is to plan, how to work as a team and how to work efficiently. Our team started out the year unprepared, and adopted an unofficial “Plan as we go” strategy, which turned out not to work well. Planning as we went meant there was a lot of debating to do, and when people are expected to debate each other one minute and try to work together the next, it often leads to people not working with each other. Not only that, but instead of having hours of pure build, we would build for minutes, then stop to decide what next. Even during competition day, when it came time for repairs, tempers flared and productivity sank. A bit after the competition ended, we held a meeting about what to change for next year; the most iterated thing was the source of our problems: That we need to plan beforehand for a more efficient and team-positive build process.
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