Without giving away the unknown missions for those who have competitions next week, I wanted to post a quick report about today's event.
Thank you to all the volunteers, the teams, coaches, mentors, and visitors, and the host site, St Matthews Lutheran, and many thanks to Robofest in MI for helping make our event a success today.
Our event was a Junior competition (5th-9th grade) with teams from the greater Houston area.
The fact that robots could come from any materials did add a bit of twist to the competition and made for some interesting attachments. Our teams today all used LEGO robots. This challenge requires 2 robots to complete its missions.
We followed the suggested format from the robofest website for today's event. First teams checked-in, then they did practice, light sensor adjustments and then team interviews. Then we did our opening ceremonies followed by the unveiling of the unknown missions. Then the actual rounds.
Teams were given 2 runs, then we did finals with the top two teams. Since our competition was a small event, we had one competition track and 2 practice tracks. For larger competitions, having 2 competition tracks running would work best.
I think it worked well to have the team interviews before the cermonies, unveiling. It got teams while they were fresh and gave everyone an opportunity to get settled in before visitors arrived.
Once the unknown parts were unveiled, teams programmed their robots to be able to complete the entire mission.
The top team for todays event was ET 2 from Kingwood, TX. They are eligible to attend the Robofest World event. Congratulations to all the teams that participated today.
Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The majority of the teams were rookie teams. Since this event was small with 4 teams, the atmophere was informal. We used the church gym and had enough space for the team pits, practice and competition area and still have space for visitors and concessions. The church youth group did a great job with concessions, we had breakfast tacos, pizza, hot dogs and other items.
We had several people drop by who had participated in FLL in the past, including one family who had driven all the way from Austin.
At the end of the event, we had a Robofest cake. I had the local Walmart decorate it from a picture of the Robofest Logo. We did take pictures of it before we ate it.
Robofest send us some very nice certificates and volunteer thank you gifts. The team certificates were very nice and included a team photo and robot photo as part of it from photos that have been previously uploaded to the coach's sites for each team. IEE had provided participation medals for teams.
If you attended today's event and took pictures, please send me copies.
If you want to learn more about robofest, see their website at www.robofest.net
I do like the fact that it's a spring event, the focus is on programming, you can continue to use RCXs and that it continues all the way through high school and you could use other languages such as Java. There isn't a research assigment, so team meetings are more focused on the programming/building part without knowing 100% of your missions until the day of the competition. The other challenge is that you do have watch that your robot doesn't run off the boards. There's no borders like on an FLL table.
thanks,
Susan