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Lesson 7

How the Studio Works

The classroom is a studio, and we run it like an engineering company. This page is the short version of how a year in that company works.

Sprints

The season is built on three week sprints. At sprint planning your team publicly commits to a short list of deliverables. Each sprint ends at a pool day, where “done” means it works in the water, not that it looks done on the bench. If the pool falls through, the sprint still ends with a bench demo. Teams are three to seven people, and every deliverable has one owner. The sprints themselves sit inside a semester plan we write in Sprint 0 from last season’s evidence; see Waterfall and Agile for why we run it this way.

Lessons and cards

Once a week there is a short lesson, usually twenty to forty minutes, often a discussion seminar rather than a lecture. Every lesson is a one page lesson card: a core question, a short resource, an activity, and one artifact. You clear a card with a ninety second oral check or by teaching it back to your team.

If you miss a class, the card works the same way when you return. There is no separate makeup track, because there is only one system.

Your grade

Work is complete or not yet, and redos are always open. Your grade starts the year on this basis: you keep your A by keeping your cards cleared and your contributions real and visible. Contributions become visible through your sprint status report, which also carries your hours. That record belongs to you.

Two habits

Our working code is adapted from Tom Sachs’ Ten Bullets, and two of those habits show up everywhere.

The first is being on the clock. Studio time is work time, and your weekly status report is that habit made visible.

The second is writing things down. Whoever makes a design decision writes a short Design Decision Record: the decision, what forced it, the options, the reasoning, and what it costs. Later in the year we add design specs, which describe what a thing must do before anyone builds it. None of this is paperwork about engineering. It is engineering, and it is how any one of us can answer when a judge points at the robot in May and asks why.

What this protects

Most of your time is still designing and building robots. The structure exists to protect that time, not to replace it. This year we build in a way we can finish, defend, and be proud of.

Where things live

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.