Welcome to the children’s website about their journey to enter a RoboCup Junior competition in New Zealand.
Their aim is to compete in the Rescue Challenges. One of the requirements of being in the competition is listed in the Rescue Rules as:
7.1.2. All teams must maintain a logbook detailing the design, development and construction of the robot and its programs.
This website will be their means to achieve this. It will allow them to keep a record for themselves while, at the same time, allowing them to share what they are doing with family, friends, and the school. It will also give them some experience of using WordPress as a platform.
Some of our aims are to:
- Examine different line following algorithms from very basic to more advanced
- Critically evaluate how each algorithm performs and use observation of the robots behaviour to go back to their code and make iterative changes to see if improvements can be made
- Develop strategies to make changes on the fly, during competition time, if the robot fails the task, for any reason.
- Learn documentation skills and ways of managing code history.
We hope you enjoy following their progress 🙂
Update – September 19th, 2019:
Today we went to the Regional Taranaki Robocup Junior competition held at the TET Stadium in Stratford. James competed in the Junior Rescue competition. Sara and Oliver competed in the Senior Rescue competition.
The children should all feel very proud of what they achieved coming 1st in each of the competitions 🙂 The wins would have made them eligible for the National Robocup competition. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the Nationals were held two weeks prior to our Regionals.
The competition was a wonderful learning opportunity for everyone to see how the competition is run and to experience the realities of everything not exactly going to plan despite lots of testing in our own environment.
When things didn’t go right, the children showed wonderful resilience and were able to make some code changes on the fly which resulted in a perfect last run for the Senior competition.
A huge thank you to Sandy for all the organising she did to get us to the competition and to Fabiano and Marie for helping with transport and supporting us all.
Update – September 3rd, 2019:
The children have worked really hard over the last few months. Today is the first time that they all got their code working to a competition standard where the robots autonomously performed everything they were required to in their grade of the competition. Sarah and Oliver in the Senior competition and James in the Junior competition. They should feel very proud of themselves. The two videos, below, speak for themselves!