Brainstorming Your Robot

The first meeting of a new season is always the same. Someone opens the game reveal video, we watch it twice, and then we do nothing with the robot for the next few days. Brainstorming is not about having the most creative idea. It is about finding the right idea fast enough that you still have time to build, test, and refine it. The teams that skip this phase and jump straight into building rarely end up with the robot they wanted.

Step 1: Analyze the Game First

Before sketching a single mechanism, spend your first session breaking down the game itself. The question you always start with is this: what is the highest-value thing we think we can consistently score?

That sounds obvious, but the answer changes every year, and getting it wrong early sends your entire build in the wrong direction.

In Full Volume, the obvious choice to a newcomer was the red blocks. They unlocked high-level bonuses and looked impressive. But when we looked closer, we realized that red blocks were too large to handle alongside green and purple blocks in the same match. Chasing the red block bonus meant abandoning everything else. The green and purple blocks, because of their similar size, could be handled by the same intake mechanism, making them far more efficient to score together. That single observation defined our entire build direction.

In Rapid Relay, the balls could score in all four zones of the goal. Identifying that early told us that range and flexibility mattered more than raw power, which shaped every mechanism we considered.

In Mix and Match, it was pairing the beams with the pins together. The bonus structure rewarded matching, so a robot that could handle both object types was worth more than one that specialized in just one.

Step 2: Generate Raw Ideas

Once you understand what you are trying to score, move to the simplest possible version of how to score it. This is not a polished design session. These are rough hand-drawn diagrams, two-sentence descriptions, and references to mechanisms you have seen work in previous seasons.

In Rapid Relay, we put four concepts on the table: a standard catapult with adjustable tension, a double catapult for launching two balls simultaneously, a flywheel, and a backroller that combined a catapult for the upper goal with a rubber band roller on the back for the lower goal. None of these were fully designed. They were just enough to argue about.

In Full Volume, we went through a green-block-only robot, a purple-block-only robot, and several elevator configurations before settling on a direction. The core concept stabilized early, but the mechanisms serving it kept improving throughout the season.

Keep ideas rough at this stage. Overdesigning before you debate is a waste of time and creates attachment to concepts that have not been stress-tested yet.

Step 3: Research Before You Commit

After generating initial ideas, look outward. Research what other teams are building, share videos and links within the group, and use what you find to pressure-test your own concepts. This is not copying. It is checking your assumptions before you invest build time.

If multiple strong teams have already tried the mechanism you are excited about and consistently failed with it, you need to know that before you commit to six weeks of building.

Step 4: Debate Every Idea

This is where the real brainstorming happens. Argue every concept, not to tear ideas down, but to understand their limits before you build anything.

In Rapid Relay, we seriously considered a long-range launcher. It was an exciting idea. But when we stress-tested it through debate, the problems became clear: alignment was difficult to program consistently, and small angle errors at distance caused dramatic accuracy loss. We cut it. Not because someone overruled the room, but because the evidence built through argument made the answer obvious.

Arguments in brainstorming should be structured. For every idea, answer three things:

• What does this design do well?
• What breaks first under match pressure?
• How hard is it to recover when it does break?

If a design cannot survive those three questions, it should not survive brainstorming.

Step 5: The Scoring Matrix

Every idea that survives debate goes into the scoring matrix in your Engineering Notebook. This is not a formality. It forces you to assign numbers to opinions, which removes the loudest voice in the room from the decision.

Our matrix scored each concept across seven criteria:

A design that sounds great in debate but scores poorly across five of those seven criteria does not move forward, regardless of how much anyone wants it to. The matrix removes personal bias from the decision and gives you a documented rationale for every choice you make.

It also creates accountability later. When a design choice comes back to hurt you mid-season, you can look at the matrix and see exactly what you predicted, what you missed, and why you made the call you did. That retrospective is just as valuable as the decision itself.

Step 6: First Prototype

Once you have a direction, build a first prototype. Not a competition robot, but a rough version of the core mechanism, built fast, to see if the idea holds up when it is physical and not just on paper.

Brainstorming ends the moment something is real. Until then, ideas are free. Use that freedom deliberately, because once you start building, changing course costs time you cannot get back.