Build a Bot – Techno Joy!
Well the Build a Bot week long course is over, it ran from the 11th to the 15th of July and went off smashingly.
The 3 teams and their robots
The week long course ran in the last week of the school holidays and we had six young evil geniuses ready to build robots to conquer the world. With a mix of lessons on building, designing and programming the students were soon creating robots to deal with the furious challenges I laid before them. Working in teams of two the guys built robots to deal with different problems, from precision robot movement all the way through to using advanced sensors like the ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance of obstacles and light sensors to detect and follow lines.
A robot on the course
Their final challenge threw all the concepts together and had them build a robot to collect a series of loops and columns, all the while having to avoid knocking over walls or collectable items (Which would lose them points). The designs were all different. From a munching robot that used big jaws to “eat” all the collectables (its giant mouth/claw was truly fierce), to a team that collected rings with a long spike and used a massive boom to pick up the columns. The winning team, however, favoured simplicity and structurally outstanding design. It collected the rings with a long 2 pronged “arm” that would lift to keep the loops secure. Once these had been returned to base, and extension piece was added to make the arm into a raking claw that collected the columns.
All in all great fun was had by all. A big thanks to Christopher Lanis Who helped out with robot design (he is the designer that won the Elkanah team the first prize in robot design nationally in the Lego League competition) and a big thanks to all the Students who participated, it was great to see how much you learned and the great robots you made.
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