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Lesson 0.2: Reading a Game Manual Like an Engineer

Technical Context​

The game manual is a specification document. It is written in legal language because it has to survive protests, which makes it dense, but everything your robot must do is in there. Teams that skim it build robots that score well in practice and get penalized in matches.

Reading it as an engineer means extracting three separate things: what earns points, what costs points, and what the robot is physically allowed to be.

Pass One: Find the Points​

Go through the scoring section and build a table. Nothing else, just this table.

ActionPointsWhen it countsRealistic cycle time
Example: element in low goal2TeleOp4 s
Example: element in high goal6TeleOp9 s
Example: element in high goal8Autonomousn/a
Example: end game park10Last 30 s, once3 s

The last column is the one teams forget, and it is the one that decides your strategy. A six point action that takes nine seconds is worth 0.67 points per second. A two point action that takes four seconds is worth 0.5 points per second. Those are closer than they look, and if your high goal cycle is actually twelve seconds because of alignment time, the low goal wins.

Points per second is the real currency

A two minute match has a fixed number of seconds. Ranking every scoring action by points per second tells you what the robot must be good at. Everything else is optional.

Pass Two: Find the Penalties​

Penalties are negative points that no mechanism can earn back. Read the penalty section specifically looking for things a robot's shape or behavior can cause:

  • Extension limits during the match, which constrain how far a mechanism may reach outside the frame
  • Protected zones your robot may not enter or contact
  • Rules about controlling more than a certain number of game elements at once
  • Contact rules that make certain robot geometries risky, such as anything that can wedge under an opponent

Every one of these is a design constraint. If the rules cap how many elements you may possess, an intake that scoops up five at a time is a liability, not a feature.

Read the rule, not the summary

Team discussion of the rules drifts within days of kickoff. Someone paraphrases a rule, someone else paraphrases the paraphrase, and by week three the team is designing around a rule that does not exist. When a design decision depends on a rule, open the manual and read the actual text out loud.

Pass Three: Find the Physical Envelope​

The manual defines what the robot is allowed to be. Extract these into hard numbers before any CAD work starts:

  • Starting size limit and how it is measured
  • Whether and how the robot may expand during the match
  • Allowed materials, motors, servos, and electronics
  • Battery and power requirements
  • Anything about the field that constrains geometry, such as the height of a barrier the robot must cross

Write these on a whiteboard where the build team can see them, in units, with the rule number next to each one. The rule number matters: when someone challenges the constraint in week five, you can find the source in ten seconds.

Team Updates Change Everything​

FIRST publishes updates to the manual through the season. They change scoring, clarify ambiguous rules, and occasionally invalidate a strategy that an entire region was building toward.

Assign one person to read every update the day it is released and report anything that touches your design. This is a real job and it takes about fifteen minutes per update.

Official references

Fill-in-the-Blank Practice​

  1. Ranking scoring actions by points divided by the time they take gives you points per __________.
  2. Rules that subtract points regardless of how well the robot scores are called __________.
  3. When a design decision depends on a rule, you should read the __________ text rather than a teammate's summary.
Show answers
  1. second
  2. penalties
  3. actual (the manual itself, with the rule number recorded)

Exercise: Build the Scoring Table​

Using this season's manual, fill in the scoring table above with real actions and real point values. Leave the cycle time column blank for now. You will fill it in during Module 10 after you have measured a prototype, and the difference between your guess and the measurement is usually instructive.

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