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Lesson 9

Card 0.4: Score Autopsy, Reading a MATE Scoresheet

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Before Class Reading: Where the Points Actually Are

Every team believes it knows how MATE scoring works: robot does tasks in the pool, tasks earn points, best robot wins. Every team is about one-third right.

MATE Ranger scoring rests on three pillars, and the pool is only one of them. The product demonstration, your mission runs, is the pillar everyone sees. But the engineering and communication pillar, your technical documentation, your engineering presentation, and related deliverables, is worth roughly as much as the flying, and the safety pillar runs through everything: inspections, deductions, and points awarded for protocol you either perform or forfeit. Teams routinely lose more points on land than in the water, while spending nearly all their season preparing for the water.

Think about what that means strategically. Pool points are the most expensive points available: they require a finished, working, practiced robot, and they can evaporate in one bad run, one blown fuse, one flooded connector. Documentation and presentation points are cheaper: they reward work that cannot break on competition day, that accumulates all season, and that a disciplined team banks in advance. Safety points are the cheapest of all: they are lost, not won, by teams that treated protocol as a formality.

None of this means the pool does not matter. It means a team’s plan should be built from the actual price list, and the only honest price list is last year’s scoresheets. Not memory. Not vibes. The sheets. Where did our points come from? Where did the available points go unclaimed? Was the cause skill, time, planning, practice, or a rule we did not know existed? “We ran out of time” is almost never a root cause; it is a symptom with a history, and the history is usually visible in the sheets.

This is called an autopsy for a reason. It is unsentimental, it works from evidence, and its purpose is not blame; it is that next year’s body stays alive. Everything this class chooses to build, practice, and study this season should be able to point at a line in the autopsy and say: that is why.

Prep prompt (bring in writing, BEFORE seeing the scoresheets): Predict our autopsy. Write down where you believe this team lost the most points last season, your rough guess of how many, and what you believe the root cause was. Be specific and be honest. In class you will compare your prediction against the actual sheets, and the gap between what we believe and what the record shows is the whole lesson. Written after seeing the sheets, this prompt is worthless, so date your notes.

Unit: 0, Engineering Process Format: Team analysis workshop + short presentations Time: Two sessions: one to analyze, one to present findings Prerequisites: None. This is the anchor of Sprint 0.

Core Question

Last season is data. Where did our points actually come from, where did they leak, and what does that evidence say we should build and practice this year?

Resource (~10 minutes)

  1. The teacher hands out last season’s actual scoresheets and the scoring rubrics: mission runs, engineering presentation, technical documentation, and safety.
  2. Key structure to notice: MATE scores three roughly equal pillars. Product demonstration (the pool runs), engineering and communication (presentation plus documentation), and safety. Teams routinely lose more points on land than in the water.

Activity: The Autopsy (team artifact)

Each team takes one scoring area and answers, in writing, with numbers from the sheets:

  1. What was the maximum available and what did we earn?
  2. Where were the three biggest point losses, specifically?
  3. For each loss: was the cause skills, time, planning, practice, or something we did not know about? Be honest; “we ran out of time” usually traces back to something earlier.
  4. What ONE change this season most cheaply recovers the most points?

Then present findings to the class in 5 minutes, seminar rules in effect: claims need the numbers behind them.

Clearing This Card

Contribute to your team’s written autopsy and presentation, and pass a 90-second oral check on someone ELSE’s area: after the presentations, explain one finding another team made and whether you buy their proposed fix. This forces the whole picture, not just your slice.

If You Miss This Class

Read all teams’ written autopsies, then take an extended oral check (3 minutes) covering two areas.

Why This Matters for Competition

Everything we choose to build, practice, and study this year should trace back to this evidence. When the semester plan says “design first” or “simpler claw” or “more driver practice,” the autopsy is the receipt. It also answers the fair question “why are we not building yet?” The autopsy IS robot work: it is requirements analysis, and skipping it is how last year happened.

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