Student Robotics Competition Day

So it’s the day before term starts, and yet today I’ve spent well over 10 hours on Highfield Campus. ‘But why?!’, I hear you cry. ‘Has the long Easter break finally driven you crazy?’ Well, possibly. But more probably it was because today was the Student Robotics Competition Day! Today was the day that 18 months of hard work (or, well, only a few for me) finally paid off and the nine teams from six local schools came to The Cube in the Students Union which we spent all of yesterday transforming into an arena that would put even the Romans to shame. Goodness only knows what they would have been able to achieve if they had access to as many cable ties we used!

So the arena was in place; the teams and robots arrived safely. Surely nothing could go wrong? Well……

The success of the day really depends on what criterion you want to look at. If success is lots of robots all shifting lots of balls around and even attempting to score extra points by lofting them into the nets, then I’m afraid we didn’t succeed. If success is the team you’ve been mentoring every Wednesday for the last few months even turning up to compete at all, then sadly that didn’t happen for me either. If success is the robots moving at all (for however short a time) once we press ‘GO’, then we achieved partial success. I think by the end of the day only one hadn’t made it off the start line, which is no mean achievement. If however, you judge success (as I do) by everyone having a great time and learning a lot in the process, then the project was a glorious success. No one left today feeling upset it didn’t quite work – there was an air of determined optimism that means that this time next year everyone will have learned from their mistakes and produced something much more successful. It was certainly fantastic to see so many people getting excited about robotics and engineering in general, and anything we can do to encourage that is absolutely brilliant. Roll on next year*!

But now the real work must begin apace again, with lectures restarting in less than 12 hours time. It’s going to be a very busy few weeks. But if the rest of term is as fun, challenging and educational as the last couple of days, then it’s going to be a good one!

*For the record I should probably let you know that the winning team was one of the four from Peter Symonds College. I should also thank our wonderful sponsors, Motorola, BitBox and ECS, without whom none of this would be been possible. Thanks and well done to everyone involved!