We have three primary objectives, that all of our specific goals hope to achieve:

1. Have fun.
2. Learn.
3. Help other individuals and teams have fun and learn.

In general, we believe we have the technical competency to achieve all of our competitive goals. The most important areas for us this year will be management and strategy.

Competition

Because we learned a lot about how to effectively run our team during Change Up, we think we can have more competitive success this year. We hope to use competition to motivate us to achieve all of our goals. We believe we can…

1. Win our division at the 2022 World Championship.
2. Win a judged Engineering Notebook award at the 2022 World Championship.
3. Improve our World Skills Standing of 58th from Change Up.
4. “Sweep” the Illinois State Championship: win Tournament Champion, Robot Skills Champion, and the Excellence Award.
5. Win more awards than the seven we won during our Change Up season.

Management

We need to improve the management of our time and team members this year if we want to have enough time to achieve our goals. This year, we believe we can…

1. Set timelines for each of our goals (where applicable) to stay on track.
2. Assign tasks that are interesting to who is doing them, so that they are more willing to spend lots of free time doing it.
3. Communicate about individual obligations such as homework and extracurricular activities to maximize time spent working on the robot with an efficient schedule.
4. Make sure everyone willing to do what they need to do to learn is included to foster a productive atmosphere, and team growth in future years.

Strategy

Our downfall at the Change Up LRT World Championship was strategy, when we failed to anticipate the plans of our opponents. This year, we believe we can…

1. Think about every match from our opponents’ perspectives, to help us best anticipate their strategies and reactions to our strategies.
2. Communicate with our alliance partners for every match about strategy.
3. Consider all possibly successful strategies when creating match plans, to determine what will most likely be successful.
4. Watch every match at our competitions to determine which teams would make good alliances and make informed strategy decisions.
5. Create the most efficient programming and driver skills routes by thinking through multiple options.

Design

In the past, we have had over-complex designs that didn’t work, and even when they did work, we took too much time building them that we didn’t have enough time to practice. This year we hope to streamline our robot design process. We believe we can…

1. Prioritize simplicity to maximize reliability and minimize development time, that can also execute our strategies.
2. Think through every aspect of a given design before building, to prevent major errors.
3. Consider strategy before robot design to ensure we are building with a purpose.

Programming

Throughout our team’s history, we have always had above-average programming routines and many of our team members are interested in pursuing computer science careers, so we want to continue to develop our abilities. We believe we can…

1. Earn the Autonomous Win Point in every qualifying match.
2. Implement trajectory generation and following.
3. Expand our use of state machines to enable all repetitive driver-control actions to be automated.

Building

In past years, we have run into issues when our designs were not mechanically sound enough to withstand the wear-and-tear caused by competition. During Change Up, we used our expanded knowledge of good building techniques to create a robust design that worked well throughout the State and World competitions. We believe we can continue to build robust robots that don’t fail during practice or under defense.

Community Engagement

In middle school, the team we created (23232X) would not have been able to compete without the help of a member of Niles North team 333R. In an attempt to pay it forward, we want to increase our level of robotics/VEX community involvement. We believe we can…

1. Answer as many questions posted in digital communities as possible where input may be helpful. (VEX Forum, Illinois VEX Alliance Discord, Apex Alliance Discord, Short Circuit Alliance VEX Forum Chat, etc.)
2. Create centralized educational resources and tutorials on VRC topics for future Niles North teams.
3. Reach out to possible recruits to the Niles North Robotics Club (333).
4. Reach out to members of other 333 teams for collaboration.
5. Provide assistance to Niles North feeder middle schools trying to build middle school teams.