Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
Yesterday, Martijn Boogaarts and I held a Mindstorms NXT workshop at the one of the offices of Sioux, a software development company. We had a room full of eager software engineers and their offspring. Martijn did the general presentation and an introduction to NXT-G. I took care of the ROBOTC presentation and quick intro.
 |
 |
 |
|
There were plenty of NXT sets to go around, as you can see. 13 NXT 2.0 sets and 4 NXT 1.0 sets. At the end of the day, these were all sold to the participants. |
Martijn showing a room full of software engineers the power of debugging on NXT-G. Let’s just say it was a good thing that robot was attached to a USB cable. | Once the presentations were done, people got cracking on their robots. |
The idea was simple. There was a big track, made of Lego, of course, with 3 balls in different spots that had to be brought to specific places. Points were given for completing certain parts and taken away for breaking a rule like touching your robot. Adults were given additional penalties to make their challenge a bit more difficult.
Some images of the various teams at their tables, working hard (or hardly working). I am missing one of the teams in these group shots as there were nine in total. It was one of the kids’ teams, most likely because there constantly running back and forth to the competition table! You can see them in the last picture, behind the table in front of me. A picture of the missing team has been added! Thanks Hans!
It was definitely an “Adults versus Kids” competition! I think we have some serious budding software engineers here; the kids look promising, too.
Here are all of the robots that took part in the competition. Nine teams, Nine robots.
Group 7 won the competition with full points (330). Their run was absolutely fantastic. We also had a prize for most creative robot, which was won by group 2.
I had a fantastic day and I’m pretty sure everyone else did, too!
great effort…..wish to be a part of something like this…good luck
Xander, What a great exercise for those programmers and kids. I found your link on the nxtstep. I would like to run that exercise for my FLL team here in Macon, Georgia, USA. Can you post the dimensions of your track so my team can compete with your students. Also I can’t figure the math on the 330 point performance. 10 to leave base, 50×2 for the colored balls, 90×2 for gray ball to each goal, and 30 for parking in the box. Equals 320, right? Did I understand the rules correctly? I am subscribing to your blog now. Also I gotta brag on my boys. Four eleven-year-olds created a 370 point robot for Body Forward. Unfortunately everything went wrong on the day of the state finals competition. Our best score was 210. Hard lessons learned. Go FPD Red!!!
Oh gosh, I have no idea how big that table is. It’s all Lego. I’ll ask Martijn to give you an estimate 🙂
It’s a shame about your final run in the states finals, it would’ve been so cool to get the 370 points there. As for the points in out contest, perhaps the 330 is wrong, I wasn’t the one doing the additions! 🙂
points calculation:
start with 1 NXT 2.0 box and 100 points
subtract 10 points for each extra borrowed part, with a max of 10 parts (ie. 2 other wheels not in the set is 40 points, 2 tires and 2 hubs)
then the performance.
10 to leave base,
50 for the red ball
50 for the blue ball
90 for gray ball (place it left or right)
30 for parking in the box
-40 points for adults only each time they cross the (on our table yellow) line with the wheels/tread (so not with an overhanging part like sensor/ gripper) of the robot.
-40 points when you pick up the robot (to start again?)
===== +
230 points score form the field and 100 starting points = 330 points.
PS the idea was to make it harder for the adults.
Table size I will come back to that, but the size of one square is approximately 48×48 studs
Martyn
I’m the organizer of the event, and co-builder of the table on a Sunday afternoon. The table has been built using appr. 15.000 (!) dark gray stones (2×4). The workshop was intended to learn more about NXT-G for the kids and RobotC for the adults, but besides that is was lots of fun.
One table measures exactly 1.60m x 0.80m and we needed four tables to support the Lego table!
What a great event.
Can you share a bit more of the planning side of the story?
Things like: when the day began? how long did it last? how long for each phase? How was the clock controlled? how was participation decided?
All those things that make it a challenge to pull off an event like this.
Thanks!
We started at about 9:30 where Martijn and I did our intro and presentations. Everyone started building at around 10:30-10:45 or so. At 15:30 everyone had to stop building and programming. I am not sure what you mean by “how was the clock controlled”. It was someone with a stop watch app on a phone 🙂 Everyone had 3 minutes to complete the run.
Xander, you forget to mention the pizza: 30 Domino pizza’s were delivered around 12:30 😉 I thought with all the growing-up-teenagers this would be hardly sufficient, but most kids (and adults!) were too busy building and programming the robot.
Yes of course, the pizza! I thought the delivery guy was going to pull his back out with that many pizzas. It was quite a sight.
I am organizing a lego NXT workshop in Africa I like your table set. Can you email the details for the play area dimension and the lego pieces you used in the number of lego blocks. Also what mat did you use under the play area.
Ash,
We didn’t really keep track of how many pieces we used. Most of them are 4×2 bricks, with the walls being made of 8×2 and 4x2s. It was made up of a number of large square pieces that clicked together using black connector pins. We didn’t use a mat under the playing area, the whole thing was made of Lego.