Question regarding Mission Possible planning

[AVO247]

In the Mission Possible section of scioly.org website under Planning http://scioly.org/wiki/index.php/Mission_Possible_C, advice is offered to, "Try to have transfers begin and end with a common, useful interface. If every transfer starts and ends with an electrical circuit, it is easier to put everything together." I wasn't sure what this mean. Can someone help?

Thank you,

AVO247

[bernard]

It's often easiest to start brainstorming a lot of transfers. After brainstorming, you'll want to put them together in a sequence that can run smoothly. In the past, teams had a list of tasks to complete, without specific requirements about how they had to be done (e.g. with electricity, without electricity, etc.) If most of your tasks are completed only using mechanical steps and one is completed using electricity, it'll be hard to fit that one electrical step into your sequence of mechanical steps unless you have a step that goes from mechanical to electrical, say a switch.

With this year's event, transfers seem to make a possible sequence pretty clear: if you brainstorm steps for a lever to a wedge and a wedge to a screw, you'd probably put the steps in that order.

By the way, the event Mission Possible has varied quite a bit over the years, and the wiki hasn't been updated all that much to reflect the event over the years. Some of the things on the page, including what you were looking at, are from 2010 and might not be relevant to this year's event.