- Have a computer monitor mounted at the front of our pit instead of the back to show off images that represent the build season. Have an area just outside of the pit for conversations with judges.
- Keep seeking sponsors through out the year. Start earlier if possible because the deadlines happen so quickly for rookie teams.
- Make enough swag/buttons. Although we were trying to be budget conscious, providing enough swag/buttons adds spirit to the event. We should have produced 500 buttons (instead of 250) so that we did not run out of buttons on Saturday.
- Provide some Judge Bling – Many of the SD team had special decorations that they gave the judges to wear. It was quite nice to see, but we were not represented.
- Provide small gifts to other teams to thank them for participating with us and for helping us.
- Perhaps attend a smaller regional. The SD regional was huge. It was very fun to be a part of something so big; however, we would have run more matches at a smaller regional and would have had a better shot at being part of a finals experience.
- Improve Driver Station design and have the ability to leverage two operators instead of one to include more team participation.
- Allow for more software development time and earlier decisions on the mechanical design. Complete design direction by the end of week 2.
- Get Autonomous working sooner. Do not wait for completion of the entire robot to get Autonomous functional as it is so critical to Ranking Points.
- Develop better Checklists of things to accomplish during build season broken down by teams. This will also help with weekly blog posts.
- Find mentors with pertinent experience in FIRST software. Just because the team has someone that knows JAVA is not enough to rapidly build and deploy code for the robots.