Students who have experience might begin with the engineering design process and engineering notebooks as described on the next page. However, teams with students who are new to robotics will most likely begin by building the direction bot of the season.

The direction bots can be found here. This year's direction bot is called "Rise".

It works best to provide a color copy of the pdf directions for students to use and take notes on if needed.

Once the direction bot is built, students need to practice driving and learn how to play the game.

These students then have two choices:

1. they can begin learning how to code their robot
2. they can begin researching other build ideas and try to innovate and improve their robot so it is able to play the game even better.

Students with experience can skip building the direction bot and may dive straight into their notebooks and researching robot builds for the new game each season. Beware, this is not an easy path and takes commitment! But these are the robots that do very well each season.

In the end, the direction bot is your safety net. If your tournament date is approaching and a functioning robot is nowhere in site, then give the team the directions to a robot so they can arrive at the tournament with something that works.