I like to use the off-season to teach skills.  One year my team really 

wanted to finish and perfect missions that they had worked on for the 

tournament.  They enjoyed doing that, so they just worked through the 

missions.  The next year, they were burned out on the missions after the 

tournament, so I gave them mini-missions to solve.  We were working 

towards having soccer playing robots.  I started with small tasks: kick 

a ball into a goal, then use the light sensor to follow a line to a 

goal, etc.: Our post-season came to an end before we got farther.



I felt that my team needed work on discipline and skills, so I taught 

them again how to calculate the rotations to go a certain distance and 

for various turns ( 45 degree, 90 degree).  I then gave them robot 

specifications and gave them a mission to solve and program.  I built 

the robot myself outside of meetings.  They were not allowed to see 

"MysteryBot" until they had written and shown me their programs.  I did 

this with them early in the season before I would let them design and 

build their robot and tackle the food factor missions.  I think it would 

make a good off-season activity.



Another idea I had was to have everyone purchase a book and work through 

the activities in the book.  My current favorite is Winning Designs for 

Lego Mindstorms NXT.  With a beginner team, I might prefer The 

Unofficial Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0.



Donna Cornwell

[log in to unmask]





On 12/5/2011 5:26 PM, Mary Kendrick wrote:

> Hi all!

>

> Well, brand new coach here - we made it to our first tournament, using it as a

> learning experience for the years to come.  We did fairly well and the team will

> continue to meet throughout the rest of the school year.

>

> Ideas for goals and focus of these meetings is to redesign our robot and work

> on programming the robot to accomplish all missions in Food Factor.

>

> So the question is, how do you vetern coaches run the off-season meetings?

> Do you meet off-season, making it a school-year club?  Any ideas or

> suggestions on how best to use this more relaxed time is GREATLY appreciated!

>

> Thanks so much,

> Mary

> TechnoSharks

>

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