With the State Championship on Sunday, March 3, the season is over for our FTC team. It was a long 
effort, starting in late August. We built and rebuilt several robots. Unfortunately, our robot didn’t 
perform well at the tournaments.  We have some lessons to learn.

We had some bright spots, but there are changes we need to make for next year.

The Good
* Our outreach was very helpful in getting the team into the Championship tournament. We need 
  to have everyone assigned to at least one  outreach event.
* The Notebook was well done and a good journal. The science and engineering section seemed 
  to be important to the judges. We need to add more testing and testing results. You want to 
  show that development is partially driven by testing and evaluation.
* We had several members take up the programming. We need to do more programming. We 
  don’t need just one program, but rather many programs. They can be written and reviewed 
  before and without the robot. We need to consider more pseudo code and code design ideas.

The Bad
* We continued to build right up to the run time at the tournaments. We need to stop building 
  the week before the tournament and practice and refine what we have working. 
* The designs were not fully agreed to and seemed to changed based on whoever was at the work 
  session. 
* Everything focused on one massive robot with little prototyping or experimentation. We have 
  plenty of parts and even an demo bot that could  have been used.
* Wire management was always an issue (use less zip ties and more twist ties and tape so they 
  can be moved and removed. (Zip ties are not removable).
* Need to do more development in parallel. Define components and build them somewhat 
  independently
* Testing of parts needs to start early (in October) and throughout the season. Testing is the 
  precursor to practice, which we also lacked.
* We did not embrace the lessons we could have learned from the qualifying tournaments. I never 
  saw a list of proposed actions and corrections.
* We had some attendance issues. Some members were deeply involved because we didn’t know 
  their status

The Ugly 
* The drive train was always a problem. We spent way too much time on the drive train. There 
  was insufficient support for the drive axles and too many places for them to fall apart.
* The robot performance was disappointing. We scored very few points in all three tournaments.

We need to have an adjusted team structure next year – more subgroups, multiple and competing 
solutions. In short, we need to apply more engineering discipline and rigor.