Robocup Junior Australia Metro Events 2017

The third and final reason for the slow down in blog articles over the last couple of months has been my volunteer work for Robotics.

You might remember that when my two son’s were still at school, I started mentoring for the All Saints’ College Robotics Club which runs as an extracurricular activity on Friday afternoons.

Even though both of boys have left the school and are at university studying Engineering (bet that is a surprise!!), I have continued to mentor for the Robotics Club. Donna Hatton who works at the school’s Technical Support Centre (TSC) is the driving force behind the club and she says that I cannot stop mentoring…. and she knows where I live!!

This year I also joined the Robocup Junior Western Australia Committee as a Rescue Advisor. Robocup Junior Australia is a project-oriented educational initiative that supports local, regional and international robotics events for young students. Robocup Junior includes a competition for Primary and Secondary school aged students and is divided into three challenges:

• Rescue (Line and Maze)
• Dance
• Soccer

All Saints’ College has teams that have competed in both the Rescue and Dance challenges. The teams usually place well and have won a number of WA state and National championships.

On the 3^rd and 10^th of June, the Robocup Junior WA Committee held the inaugural North and South Metro events. Thanks to both Sacred Heart College and All Saints’ College for providing the venue and facilities for the North and South Metro events (respectively).

These events were designed to be a learning experience to prepare teams for the WA State Competition on 4^th and 5^th August 2017. The day started with workshop and practice time with mentoring encouraged from students and adults to any of the teams attending regardless of the school they are from. In the afternoon a competition was held, allowing the teams to experience what it would be like to compete in a State or National competition. While these events were not actually qualifying events for the WA State Competition, guaranteed registration at the States was offered to the teams finishing in the top three positions in each division of each challenge.

Here are some photos from the opening sessions of each event. Thanks to Tim Schmitz for being the Master of Ceremonies.

North Metro Event – Sacred Heart College

South Metro Event – All Saints’ College

Thank-you to all those who volunteered and helped on the day as well as the members of the Robocup Junior WA Committee who put many hours into planning and setting up the events.

David

PS: I will be publishing some more posts about robotics, including some examples of coding with EV3 Basic (an extension for Microsoft Small Basic).

This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.