Tips for Teams
How can I maximize my chances of having a good time and learning from the Challenge?
1) Manage your time
The CRE[AT]E Challenge has two parts: a course which supports a project. Successful teams should plan to meet approximately weekly for most of the season to be able to complete these parts, and likely more often (including possibly weekends and evenings) in preparation for design reviews, for project work, and to meet with co-designers. Remember that co-designers have their own lives and schedules you will need to work around - don't expect your partners to bend to your last minute testing requests! Familiarize yourself with the schedule for key milestones and plan accordingly.
Also, remember that you will need to coordinate peer reviews with other teams that may not be in the same time zone as you. Include your time zone when coordinating, or agree on a single time zone (Beaver Works uses Eastern Time Zone for scheduling live events and Anywhere on Earth for assignments).
2) Brainstorm
Don't get stuck on a single idea at the beginning. Many teams have lost valuable time because they were too wedded to one glorious idea that later proved to be impractical, costly, or overly complicated. Generate many ideas that are each different ways to solve your co-designer's stated problem and seriously consider how they might work before committing to one particular path.
3) Solve the problem
The Challenge is about using engineering design to solve a disability-related problem alongside your co-designer. If you find yourself focusing on how you can build something impressive rather than building something that solves your co-designer's stated challenge, you should reconsider what you are doing. You may sometimes encounter solutions that are very simple - solve it, and move on. Simple solutions are usually quite elegant and are the aspirations of good designers and engineers. Avoid the temptation to make the problem more difficult than necessary just to build a fancier product. The Scoping a Project section of the course has some advice for properly scoping your project.
4) Get help, give help
The CRE[AT]E Community is here to help you. Ask for help from your teammates, from other teams, and from remote mentors and staff! That is what the Discord server is for, and why you should sign up. If you are able to provide help to another team, do so!
5) Learn to work as a team
The members of your team all have unique skillsets that they bring to the table - identify them and capitalize on them! Is someone particularly skilled at conducting interviews, coordinating logistics, prototyping circuits, etc.? Also consider identifying each of your "superpowers:" perhaps someone is really great at conflict resolution or making brownies to power your late night sessions!
Remember that your co-designer is part of your team and the expert at understanding the scope of the problem you're trying to solve together. When you first meet, ask what role they would like to take on your team: perhaps they are the team leader or coordinator, or perhaps they are very busy and would prefer to be more hands-off. Regardless, the team's co-designer should sign off on user needs + product requirements and should provide input to each design iteration.
How can I maximize my chances of not having a good time?
Bad ideas that we have seen teams enthusiastically execute.
1) Don't communicate
Communication ensures that your team members, your remote mentors, and Challenge staff know what is going on with your team and are able to help you. Being completely isolated from all of the above while doing a community-focused exercise like the CRE[AT]E Challenge maximizes your chances of misery.
Not communicating with your co-designer during your project can also help you build faster... but you will be much more likely to be moving in the wrong direction, and you will be abandoning the key idea of product co-design along the way.
2) Treat everything as a competition and other teams as opponents
Although the CRE[AT]E Challenge involves a few rewards at the end of the season, it is not fundamentally a competition. You do well in the Challenge by learning about engineering design and working with your co-designer and the broader community to solve a specific problem that is often quite different from team to team. The greatest prize for any team is the experience of working with a co-designer through a design process, and coming up with a prototype. In some cases, your prototype works out and is kept and used by your co-designer because you have solved the problem. However, you can learn a lot and have a very successful CRE[AT]E Challenge even if your prototype doesn't end up working.
You can choose to ignore all this and focus only on "doing better than other teams," or "building a cooler project," but teams that have chosen to do that have historically neither done well in their own projects, nor been very happy at the end of the season.
3) Come up with a specific product and then find a co-designer to match
A few teams have taken this approach in the past, oftentimes because there is something specific they want to build that is entirely independent of anyone's real needs. We have never seen this go well. Teams that follow this approach are not able to follow our engineering design curriculum and typically do not produce particularly feasible products.
4) Ignore the course
There is a whole engineering design course that is part of the Challenge and is based on a course offered at MIT that supports the project portion of the Challenge. You may choose to ignore this if you want, and focus entirely on the project, if you are a fan of increasing the difficulty unnecessarily, minimizing your learning, and minimizing the chances of your project being successful.