FIRST® LEGO® League robotics competition 2013.

Today our team of ten Year 6, Year 7 and Year 8 students participated in the FIRST® LEGO® League robotics competition. The theme of this year's challenge was "Natures Fury", a reference to natural disasters and how robots can help in these situations. A complete description of the event, rules and the 19 missions can be found on their website. The fully set competition mat can be seen below:

And here is our team, celebrating our successful day!

This is a well organised annual event for under-16s held in many locations around the world.  Besides being an exciting day out, it is a fantastic opportunity to develop skills in programming, robotics, problem solving, teamwork and much else.  Recommended.

For sixth-form and college students (ages 16-18) Student Robotics, run by the University of Southampton and Bristol University, holds an annual robotics competition as well.

Project 2 (Year 7) Navigating around a track.

Initially in this project, Year 7 students program the robot to safely navigate from the start to the finish positions which are marked on a track, shown below.  A barrier is set up to force the robots to make turns along the way.  To be successful, students need to measure distances and turns accurately and then set the parameters accordingly on the robot's actuators.  I haven't introduced sensors yet, we'll get to that in Year 8.

As you can see, this track is cheap and easy to make.  It fits into the corner of a room.  I put a metre stick in the picture above for scale and then demonstrated the following two simple programming examples to get students started:

Once students achieved this I explained the concept of parallel processing and added complexity to the track navigation project.  Here are my three tasks in order.

1) Navigate the track from the start to the finish positions.

2) Do task 1, and then navigate back to the start again.

3) Do task 2, but also flash the lamp in one direction and make sounds in the other.

Below is my simple demonstration of parallel processing which I used in my explanation to the students:

Note: I also showed my stronger students the loop block and challenged them to try iteration with the lamp and sounds.