Schedule
Our season in a nutshell
October & November
are the months prior to the start of the season that we use to refresh or replace the system hardware and software used by the team. It is also a good time to repair and repaint the facility as needed.
Hidden from the students, the Dead Robot Mentors work very closely with the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR) to help design and create each year’s Botball game board and competition rules.
December
is our Open Season. Students attending public or private schools in 8th to 12th grade are encouraged to apply. Experience with hardware design, 3D printing or software development is desired but not required. High school Juniors & Seniors will be considered for leadership positions.
Interested students and parents should reach out to us via the Contact Us page on this website. No new students will be accepted after 31 December.
January
is the month of Tryouts. We will meet in the BotCave on Saturdays from 1-5pm. Students will work together in teams to learn how the Dead Robot Society builds and programs robots. Students can choose to be either builders or coders.
The Mentors will be evaluating the team members for how well they work with their teammates and how they react to the directions of the Student Leaders & Mentors. Specifically, we are looking to weed out “lone wolves”. This team succeeds because we are a TEAM. To be clear, a student who is the world’s best coder but cannot “pair program” will not be invited to join the team in February.
February
is when the team starts working on this year’s challenge. We meet every Saturday (1-5) and Monday & Wednesday (7-9).
We will begin by evaluating the game rules and scoring rubric to determine which game objects will be moved into scoring position. Every year the game board has different objects that must be moved around the board. Game objects can start in random places and will score different points depending on the degree of difficulty in getting the object into scoring position. Objects are typically foam blocks and pompoms. But every season has something new. A few years ago we had a Fisher-Price “Rock-a-Stack” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-a-Stack on the board and the teams had to find the rings and stack them in the correct order.
All the students are involved in developing the scoring plan. We have two robots that must work together on half of an 8×8 table. Based on our 25 years of experience, the only thing that we know for sure is that the first plan created by the team is not going to be the one we take to competition. That first plan is going to be too hard or too easy or too slow. So, students should keep this in mind if their brilliant idea is not immediately accepted by the Team Leaders, there is a good chance we might come back to it!
March
is typically a difficult month! The robots are moving and scoring some points, but not fast enough. Or, both robots are crashing into one another while trying to score their game pieces. The only way to solve this is what we call “time on target”. The students need to be in the BotCave as often as possible to work through the problems.
There are a dozen Botball regions in the US, averaging eight to ten teams per region. The Dead Robots compete in the Greater DC Region against 15 other teams from DC, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The headquarters for Botball is in Oklahoma. Their regional tournament is always first and occurs in March. This is the first time that we get a chance to see what other teams have done. It is not uncommon for us to add another weeknight to the schedule in March, just to increase our students time on target. The more hours the students spend working on the robots, the better our results during competition.
April
is the month of the DC Regional Competition! Our regional event always occurs on a Saturday. A week prior to the tournament, we will meet every day, 4 hours on Sat & Sun and 2 hours M-F. Once we know the date of the regionals, please try to keep that week open.
One of the things that we have learned is to use dedicated robot operators. Some teams try to let everyone on the team go to the table and set up robots. While we appreciate the sentiment, we train four students to set up and run our robots. Those four students must be in the BotCave every day during the week prior to competition. Those four students will run the robots exclusively prior to competition. We only want them to set up and run the robots during the final week of practice.
Regional Competition
is an all-day event held at Great Mills High School, which is in Maryland, about two hours south of us. The doors open at 8am and the students from each competing team line up to practice running their robots on the competition tables. There are usually three tables, which means the students must test their robots on both sides of the three tables. Although the tables are supposed to be standard, each of the six sides can be slightly different. Practice time ends at 10am.
The first part of the competition has each team running their two robots without an opposing team on the opposite side. These runs are called ‘Seeding Rounds’. Each year there are rare scoring items within reach of both teams. During the three Seeding Rounds the team will not have to deal with an opposing team taking scoring items away from us. Each team runs three Seeding Rounds and their Seeding Score is the average of the top two runs.
Immediately following Seeding Rounds, the teams begin the Double Elimination (aka ‘Head to Head’ or ‘Double E’) portion of the competition. In Double E, two teams will be assigned to a table. It is not a random assignment, the team with the highest average Seeding score plays the team with the lowest score. After the Head-to-Head run, the team with the higher score will continue in the upper bracket and the loser will drop into the consolation bracket. Once in the lower consolation bracket, winners continue and losers are eliminated. You must lose twice to be eliminated, hence the term Double Elimination.
At the end competition, there will be a team that has no losses (in the upper bracket) and a team that has one loss (in the lower bracket). These two teams face each other in the final round. If the upper team wins, the competition is over. However, if the lower team wins, that means both teams now have one loss. There is a five-minute timeout to allow both teams to recharge their batteries and fix their robots as needed. The teams then swap sides of the table and run a final round for the championship!
Not too long ago the Dead Robots had an early loss and battled their way through the lower bracket to make it to the finals. In the final run, both teams had less than great runs and DRS managed to get a win to force another run. In the last run of the day, both teams’ robots ran perfectly, however our robots managed to grab Botguy (a rare game piece in the center of the table) before the other team, so DRS got the win. It was a wonderfully exciting competition!
May
is the start of the Global Competition. After the final Regional Competition, the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR, Botball’s parent organization) reviews the results of the Regional games and revises the rules for the Global Competition. In some years the revisions are minor, like increasing the value of scoring objects that were ignored by most teams. In other years, significant changes are made to the game board to increase the difficulty by adding new scoring items and scoring locations.
Once the Global Competition rules are published, the team reviews the changes and decides what to do. The easy answer is to do nothing. The robots used in Regionals will still work in Globals. But that is not a winning strategy!
As we did in the beginning of the season, the team will brainstorm to find a course of action. The hardware team will look at new effectors and sensors and perhaps a whole new chassis. The software team will start writing Python code to move the robots along the new path needed to find the scoring items.
June
is like March. The team will be testing new movements and effectors to locate and grab items that score. The advantage of June is that school is out. The disadvantage is that summer jobs and vacation schedules impact the team’s productivity.
This is also the month when parents and students need to finalize their plans to attend the Global Conference. The Dead Robot Society liability insurance prohibits Mentors from acting as a guardian for a student. Each parent is responsible for travelling with their student and remaining at the Global Conference facility for the duration of the competition. If a parent is unable to attend, they could ask another student’s parent to act as a guardian in their absence, but that agreement is between the two families. The parents should ensure that the designated guardian has access to medical information in case of emergency. The Mentors need a list of which adult (25+ years of age) is the guardian for each student traveling to the conference. We will use this information if an emergency occurs, in which case our responsibility is to dial 911 and ensure the student is taken by ambulance to the local emergency room. We will notify the designated guardian, who should get in contact with the student’s parents.
July
is when the week-long Global Conference occurs. The date and location of the conference is determined by KIPR but is typically announced in January. The Dead Robots plan to attend each year and will take six to twelve students with us. In years past we have invited more students than twelve but there wasn’t enough room in the ‘pit area’ (a single 8ft long table for each team). The extra students ended up sitting in the stands with audience, which did not allow them to fully participate in the competitions.
September
is the end of the season. We generally try to have an end of season ‘no host’ party, organized by the parents and held at one of the parents’ houses. At this event we would like to congratulate the students on their success this year. It also offers us the opportunity to wish our graduating seniors good luck at college.