LEVEL UP - 7 Things Robotics Teams Do At The Beginning Of The Season
Note: this blog post will be updated from time to time with more new updates and added details 🙂 This post was most recently updated on: 7/17/2025
With school right around the corner, many are wondering “How do we get our robotics team up and running quickly and ensure our team is running like a well oiled machine?”
Well, I’m glad you asked! There are many ways to begin a season, and there is no 100% correct way to do it. V5RC (The V5 VEX Robotics Competition) is all about student centeredness, so as long as you’re continuing to let students guide the process, then however you and your team decide to approach the season, that’s great! And as you can already guess, this article will be focused on the VEX V5RC competition, but the advice below can for sure be applied to other programs as well, whether VEX IQ or other entities like FLL, FTC, FRC, BEST and other great programs.
A quick note on some extra resources:
If you’re looking for a webpage with lot’s of great starting points on robotics, click here. If you’re looking for the VEX V5 Library, which contains tons of useful info on all the things related to electronics, mechanical, programming and more, then click here. Both of these sites have proven to be extremely helpful to me and my students. No matter what kind of robotics you’re into, it’s always good to start at the source of all the info.
7 Things Robotics Teams Do to LEVEL UP at the Beginning of the Season:
Prioritize team members over the robot
Focus on building positive team culture
Establish clear communication and leadership structure
Determine project management processes
Maintain a detailed engineering notebook
All team members need to help contribute. Establish an efficient way to collect team members work logs/pictures. Very good examples of engineering notebooks can be found here and here.
Study the EXPERT criteria on the rubric and ask for help if you need clarification. NOTE: The rubric and Guide to Judging was recently updated and the Engineering Notebook Rubric is now 2 pages. I advise all coaches and students to read it thoroughly!
Perform thorough game analysis and brainstorming
Avoid over-complicating a design concept
I feel like I could write an article on each of the 7 things listed above, and I probably will do that along with some YouTube videos, but for now I hope this quick read serves as a helpful reminder as you get prepared to start back to school.
As always, with all things robotics, continue to
share knowledge, teach with passion (or coach robotics with passion), and transform the world.
- Josh
