Last week we ran our team’s mock kick off on Wednesday. We had three groups of new and returning members read the 2017 game summary, complete the “Actions That Score Points” activity and finally go through the “Scoring Analysis” activity.

There were a few things that I missed in the 2017 Mock Kick Off Game Summary. The reveal video, not sure how I forget to include it, but one group started watching it and I told the other groups to watch it. Another thing that would be helpful to include is information about qualification matches, team ranking, and alliance selection. Most of the returning members are familiar with these topics but new members are not.

Another thing to do before next time is to take aside the group leaders and explain the instructions and handouts for all of the activities. I explained them to each group leader individually but having to do it 3 separate times wasn’t as much fun. We also need to instructions for popcorn reading the rule summary.

Activity Feedback

After the activities were all done we sat down with the group leaders and collected feedback about the mock kick off and activity instructions.

Some lesser points of feedback:

• Returning members probably don’t need to attend every Mock Kick Off in the future(Returning members will be group leaders)
• Its hard to emphasize the importance of kick off to new members(mock or not)
• Should call on veteran members to explain bold terms in the rule book
• Add more game piece time to score examples
• We should add name tags for members during kick off

One important discovery was that our team discussion format wasn’t going to work for kick off. We have 50 members on our team this year which breaks down into 8 different groups. The plan was to have each group present their list from each activity. This has worked previously when we’ve had ~4 groups. With double the groups we’d be covering (mostly) the same thing again and again. Eyes in the room will quickly glaze over and people will stop paying attention.

Our new team discussion format will have each group selecting a representative still. However instead of presenting their entire list at once each group representative will say one item on their list. The next group representative will say a different item on their list(no duplicates allowed). This continues until a group runs out of items to talk about on their list. Eventually only one group will have anything left to say. We’ll call this group the “winner” and give out some candy to the group. This should help keep things interesting and will motivate the students with sugar.

This new discussion format won’t work for the Scoring Analysis activity. I think we’ll have to have each group present their top scoring strategy and anything else important. But this new format should work for the Games Rule and Ways to Score activities.

Scoring Analysis Template Feedback

The scoring analysis sheet wasn’t perfect, our test run exposed a few flaws some areas we could improve. The first is that we should make use of background color to help explain the purpose of cells. Yellow will be used for column headings and row headings. These items also have a description available for more explanation. Grey will be used to identify cells that are not supposed to be edited by the user. Red will be used to note any errors, such as the sum of time to complete adding up to more than the match time.

The format of the sheet has also been changed a little, we are no longer planning on breaking actions down into items that don’t score points. Instead we will roll that time into the action that does score points. We’ve also added a checkbox to indicate if the action earns a ranking point. The final major change is the addition of a “greedy” cycle row, this row uses all of the leftover match time to fit in as many cycles as possible. You can find the updated template here.