Strategy Resources

Selecting Your Driveteam

First of all, I’m gonna preface this by saying that nothing I’m going to say is groundbreaking. Here’s a great TBA article interviewing the 254 drive coach for his thoughts!

When I’m picking my drive team, I’m looking for a few things, in order:

• Respect

• Responsibility

• Good communication skills

• Levelheadedness under pressure

• Good attitude

• Skill

You’ll notice that skill is at the bottom of this list. I can teach most high schoolers how to drive a robot or move cones from here to there pretty well (though it may take longer for some than others). What I’m not going to be able to succinctly teach is basically anything else on that list. I need my drive team to be a well-oiled machine in and out of matches. I need them to get along with each other, get along with me, actively communicate their needs, be respectful to each other, me, and teams around them, and really prioritize robotics. That means that a lot of my judgment is based on vibe check. It’s an imperfect system, but I communicate it to my students as far in advance as possible. I’m expecting a lot out of my drive team, and I need them to be ready to put in the work with a smile on their face.

Besides a vibe check that draws from the entire time I’ve known the student, I use the following to help measure some things:

Robot obstacle course
Pretty straight forward. Everyone who wants stick time gets stick time. Drive some figure 8s, approach a wall as fast as you can without touching it. I’ll periodically call out “reverse direction”, “stop”. “corner”, etc. to see how fast they’re able to innately take verbal inputs and give me robot outputs. This isn’t so much to choose the best driver, but more so to set a threshold. Most students get past this bar fine, some greatly exceed it, and some get filtered out at this stage.

Communication under pressure
I pseudo-measure this by making my students play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It’s a 2 player cooperative video game where one player has a bomb with a series of puzzles and the other player has the instruction manual for the puzzles. They have a time limit and a loud ticking clock to add a layer of pressure. I randomly pair up students and have them run through a handful of bombs as both the defuser and the expert, and I track how well they both send and receive communication with ambiguous meaning and time pressure, and how they adapt when someone isn’t understanding. I debrief between rounds and at the end, and give them a minute or so to strategize their communication before taking on the next bomb.

Teamwork and management under pressure
For this, I measure by making my students play Overcooked. Overcooked is a cooperative game where players have to work together to craft a series of dishes. They have to run around, grab ingredients, process them, and deliver them to customers. The game relies on teamwork to get things done in time (because this one has a timer too). I make students play in teams of 2, and run them through a few levels. Sometimes, I’ll have them work together and I’ll just watch. Who takes on the leader role? Is it working? Are both the leader and the follower working well? I’ll then have them run a few more levels where I am coaching them and they move where I tell them to. I measure how they respond to my directives and how effectively that all works out. Overcooked also can take up to 4 players, so I intend to have my entire drive team play together for awhile for some teambuilding.

Communications scorecard
In previous years, I created a characteristics scorecard for candidates to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 4 on the things I’m looking for. This is helpful because it helps me know where they themselves are at, and it helps me identify places where their opinion of themselves is out of line with my experience with them. Again, a huge part of drive team selection is vibe check.

Other notes
I do my best to keep the drive team balanced across as many factors as possible. This year we have 2 of our 3 subteams represented, 2 of our 4 schools, and a 50/50 split for both gender and grade level (upper vs. lowerclassmen). This helps with continuity, as it helps prevent drive team from becoming a preexisting clique that graduates together.