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Mindstorms NXT Workshop @ Sioux

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.

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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!

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It was definitely an “Adults versus Kids” competition!  I think we have some serious budding software engineers here; the kids look promising, too.

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Here are all of the robots that took part in the competition.  Nine teams, Nine robots.

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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.

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I had a fantastic day and I’m pretty sure everyone else did, too!

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.