Kickstart debrief

[Harry Cutts]

Hi all,

Now that Kickstart is over for another year (in the UK, at least), it's time for a debrief thread. The usual things: the good, the bad, and the ugly. It would be good if someone (preferably an organiser) from each venue could also give a general overview of how the day went at that location, as I'm not sure many people understand the general situation at all three venues.

Since we had a lot of new kit this year, let's discuss the development process in a separate thread (which I'll start) on srobo-devel. Also, it seems that discussion of the µgames has already begun in the "Kickstart µgames update" thread, so maybe µgames-specific stuff should stay in that thread.

Harry Cutts

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/Iyi1WFpwnGo/discussion

[Murray Colpman]

On 28/10/14 17:28, Harry Cutts wrote:
>
>
> Now that Kickstart is over for another year (in the UK, at least),
> it's time for a debrief thread. The usual things: the good, the bad,
> and the ugly. It would be good if someone (preferably an organiser)
> from each venue could also give a general overview of how the day went
> at that location, as I'm not sure many people understand the general
> situation at all three venues.
>
> Since we had a lot of new kit this year, let's discuss the development
> process in a separate thread (which I'll start) on srobo-devel. Also,
> it seems that discussion of the µgames has already begun in the
> "Kickstart µgames update" thread, so maybe µgames-specific stuff
> should stay in that thread.

Southampton (please let me know if I've forgotten anything here). Stuff
involving µGames and kit have been mentioned elsewhere, I believe.

The good:
* Doors were opened by security as requested. Very good idea to email in
advance rather than asking them on the day, it all went very smoothly.
* Rob's talk was good - it seemed well-prepared, and it seemed to be a
pretty good overview of SR and the game.
* Lunch happened without apparent issue.
* Kettle situation appeared to work perfectly well for tea/coffee.
* Teams generally enjoyed themselves and succeeded at most of the tasks.

The bad:
* I'd prefer it if all the talks were unified in the future. The way I
understand it, every kickstart location had different talks, presumably
meaning different things were mentioned in each.
* Confusion was caused by the existence of different streams (perhaps
better mentioned in the µGames thread).
* I overestimated the amount of tea, coffee, milk and sugar required -
very few people had tea or coffee. This could also have been due to the
initial lack of spoons or the relative hidden-ness of the refreshment
table, I don't know.
* Took us a while to find a pub that had space after kickstart.

The ugly:
* No air con in 32, making the lecture theatre hotter than the centre of
the sun. I had forgotten this was a thing in previous years.
* No air con in one of the four labs, despite my requesting the air con
to be on in all of them. Due to ServiceLine being closed on a weekend,
there was no way to rectify this (iSolutions handle the air con in the
Murray labs). The temperatures were, however, still much better than
last year.


Murray.