This is the seventh step in the Strategic Design process, which focuses on determining an overall strategy for each team. Before you continue, please be sure to review prior steps (see the list in the Strategic Design process article).
After identifying the “what” of the highest-priority scoring opportunities, and possibly eliminating some strategies that a team either does not have the resources for or chose not to pursue, it’s time to explore “how” to make it happen using the engineering design process.
Teams should begin to document their work in their engineering notebook, along with the concept development, CAD work, prototyping process, and testing data for each mechanism. Depending on the team’s structure, they can choose to work in parallel or in series—focusing on one priority at a time, or building and testing several different methods simultaneously.
Building and testing should be the main focus throughout the implementation process. Initial prototypes give valuable information about the feasibility and usefulness of a design, which can allow teams to draw conclusions about whether or not a design meets the strategy.
Teams should compare test results to the values that were calculated as max scores for a match, and determine how much the result differs from the expected outcome. Depending on the disparity between these numbers, the team must consider whether to lower the item’s priority, remove it from the plan, or pursue additional resources to make it possible—such as making the mechanism faster, larger, lighter, heavier, more robust, etc.
This may require going back to the drawing board several times, but remember, the engineering design process is intended to be iterative, and strategic design develops processes to build a robot that meets a specific strategy and level of performance. Keep going until all of the goals are met or until resources run out.
Learn More About Strategic Design
Continue to the next article in this series, Using the Strategic Design Method to Reflect and Reprioritize Strategies, to move on to the next step.
Credits
This version of Strategic Design is inspired by the work of Karthik Kanagasabapathy, the originator of Strategic Design in competition robotics, and the ideas are used with his permission. Karthik is a former Chair of the VEX Robotics Game Design Committee and a respected mentor in the robotics community. Additional information was provided by the mentors of team 2337, the EngiNERDs, from Grand Blanc High School in Grand Blanc, Michigan.