Robotic Regional and Solar MicroBots Workshop

A couple of days ago (October 31) it was developed the "4th Robotic Regional" in Puerto Montt city for public High Schools students.

This is the fourth time that the R.E.A.L robotic group helps to the local Educational City Office of the city to organize, prepare and execute the event. The R.E.A.L group also performs about 10 talks and workshops along the year to the schools robotics teams and teachers, to end up with this really entertainment LEGO NXT competition.

Next a couple of pictures, but I must say that something was wrong with the camera that day and most of the pictures are kind of blurry...

We arrive very early to set up the event:

For this year finals there was 8 teams in competition, they arrive very early to the event while we was still setting up the event, we put an UACh stand that gets very busy during the event. Our beloved Dandelion rover gets a lot of attention as usual ;-)

There was a number of other schools attending to see the event, with about 200 visitors during the day...

After the inauguration of the event, the teams receive the morning challenge, which was about follow a black tape path in a specific order and the contest being!

Here are some videos of the teams testing the morning challenge:

The team gets 1 hours for programming and test before the evaluation, so in the meantime we start a long time planned "MicroBots Workshop" activity in parallel. The main idea of this MicroBot Workshop, was to introduce students about renewable energy sources in particular the solar energy as the one use it in many space robots and vehicles. This was done by a talk give it by Sebastian Blanco, member of R.E.A.L:

Immediately after the talk, we select 25 students to work assembling a little Micro Solar Robot and guess what robot we propose to build?, Micro-Dandelion of course!! :-)

Later on the afternoon, the teams receive the second challenge which was about to be able to get out from a maze:

They also get 1 hour for programming and testing, after that the judges evaluate the performance and efficiency of the solutions.

Here are some videos of the teams testing the solutions:

At the end of the day, the judges give the verdict and the WINNER OF THIS YEAR ARE:

1.- Liceo Industrial Alerce

2.- Liceo Darío Salas

3.- Liceo Colonos de Alerce 

1° Place - Liceo Industrial Alerce

A big, big congratulation to all the team participating, the skills of the teams are better each year and the enormousness amount of effort and passion that the boys and girls put into each robotic solution make it worth all the efforts that we made as robotic group to make this event possible!.

One more thing, the result of the MicroBot Workshop!: A Micro-Dandelion invasion!! :-)

24 new Micro-Dandelion ready to attack!! :-)