Competition Readiness Checklist

Why Competition Readiness Checklist matters

This lesson is part of the team workflow layer, where code quality becomes a competition habit. The point is to make programming choices visible, reviewable, and recoverable when students are tired or under event pressure.

Starting point

Readiness is a system

Good event code is not just clever. It is named clearly, tested slowly, recoverable by drivers, and understandable by the whole programming subteam.

Freeze before the match

Late changes should be small, reviewed, and tied to a real match need. A stable 80 percent autonomous is often better than a risky untested 100 percent autonomous.

Build path

Practice the workflow in small loops: make a change, describe it, test it, record the result, and decide whether it is safe to keep. The lesson should produce a team artifact such as a checklist, branch, commit, tuning note, or debug log.

For this specific lesson, students should first restate the goal in robot terms, then identify the value or behavior they expect to observe, then run the smallest test that proves the idea. The lesson should feel like a guided lab: predict, run, observe, explain, and only then extend.

Debugging and failure modes

Workflow breaks when knowledge lives only in one student's head. If nobody knows what changed, what was tested, or what code is deployed, the robot becomes fragile. The lesson should make the next action obvious to another teammate.