Okay its an overly dramatic title, maybe… The team has been doing recaps for the past week, talking about what went well and what didn’t go so well. We started with a recap of District Championship. That was fine, I think most of everybody had a good time.

Some highlights of things that went well:

• Scouting
• Team spirit
• Made all three of our improvements from Amarillo to Houston
  • Second roller on shooter, Servo for climber, and retractable intake
• Park team building
• Polycarbonate strong

Some of the bad things:

• Red card 😦
• No awards, not so great job at pit interview
• Pit crew
• Award ceremony was painful

Some of the bad items, like award ceremony, isn’t exactly something we can control. We(the mentors) passed on feedback to FIT about the award ceremony, all that we can do is hope for change. Other bad items like, red card, pit crew, and pit interviews represent a thing that we very much need to improve on our team for next year. The pit crew was a little lost, and didn’t know who should be doing what every time we came back to the pit with the robot. The judging wasn’t great, we didn’t get second round judging, this is something that we will very much improve upon during the season next year.

Then our team did a post season debrief the next meeting. This one also went pretty okay. There were some shocking takeaways that surprised me. Starting with off season, we need to do fall training with advance and beginner rotations. We knew that this would be needed for next season as we’d have a significant portion of returning students. Next up is having a buddy/mentor system for new members, it would give new students a quick and easy person to go to for questions. We need to step up our outreach activities again. Covid unfortunately created a pause in most of our activities.

One of the biggest ask of students was a better sub team progress recap. The progress recaps were a little rough for most of the weeks, not enough information, too much text or not done at all. You can look at the 2022 Team Recaps here. One thing the students all wished for was a better understanding of what the robot was going to look like before it was finally done. Apparently a large portion of the students are not listening or paying attention during our recap meetings. This is a two part problem, one the recaps were bad, and two the students didn’t put the effort into understanding. Hopefully they understand the importance of the recap now. That will be emphasized next year to new members, and we will work with the student leads to produce better recaps.

Then we looked at each department and talked about what we could do better for next year. This took the majority of the meeting and I think we came up with a few good areas for improvement. The team has reached the point of being recapped out, its going into the second week and I think people are bored and wanting to get back to work. So I think we will end up meeting in our departments and discussing what they want to focus on to improve for next year.