Competition day has finally arrived! Each team has been working very hard to get finished robots ready for today, complete with programming and driver practice. We've invited some adults with engineering backgrounds to come be a judging panel and interview the teams. We've brought in some people Joey and I know from other projects. The judges included electrical engineers, a STEM librarian, and a technology librarian. The job of these judges is to ask questions about the designing and the building processes, then determine which team used a better process. After the judges deliberate, they award the winning team the Judges Award. People arrived at the rooms around 10. The students assembled into their teams and took their robots and Engineering Notebooks into a quiet room to be interviewed. We, the mentors and adults that they know, tried not to be in the rooms. We decided that made a better environment for interviewing. We did listen in on the deliberations, though. The judges talked over the presentations, but ultimately made their decision based on the Engineering Notebook. After the Judges Interviews, the students asked for a delay in the start of the competition. We decided to give them an hour to finish their robots. A lot of parents came and enjoyed touring the rooms and seeing what their children have accomplished with the club. For the matches, we used the NXT bricks and Samantha modules, which connect to the Field Control System on a laptop via wifi. Next year, the control hardware will be changing to two cell phones that use wifi direct, but since we don't have any of the new hardware we're using the old system. Unfortunately, the older system still had all of its old issues with connecting and staying connected, We had a lot of that today... Once the students finished their modifications to the robots, we started the rounds! They were very exciting, each with interesting failures. In one round, the autonomous program for one of the teams caused the robot to turn and roll straight off the ramp. In another, the students placed a robot backwards and the autonomous program ran it into the outer wall for the full 30 seconds.
0 Comments
|
This is meant to be read like a build log - start from the oldest and work to the newest.
Archives
May 2016
Categories |