The FLL season can feel long, but believe us, it can go by really fast! The table below will capture a where you want to be per week. A few tips:
Work backwards from the Qualifier Date: You may not know the date yet so assume it’s the earliest date and then adjust when you get the real date. Any row where you check “Key Milestone” will turn blue. Account for holidays and vacations: It may seem like you have a lot of time before you remember that certain team members will be away on a vacation or trip. Fill in the last column with known time blocks (those rows will turn grey). Don’t pick too many milestones as it can become confusing. Try to stay high level: e.g. “by Week 9, we will have picked our project idea” and “by Week 13, we will have 25% of our routes working”. We left a few examples but feel free to change them to what suits your team. Leave time to test your robot runs. The competition is more about reliability than about point scoring. It’s better to solve less tasks but make them work 99% of the time. We would suggest a minimum of 4 weeks for this phase as testing may force you to go back to the drawing board on certain tasks. We have a nifty tool for this in . Project development has multiple phases: While the robot part of the competition can feel circular (experiment, design, test, back to experiment), the project structure is more like a classic design project. There’s a design and research phase, an implementation phase, and a sharing phase. Make sure you leave enough time for each of them.