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HIQ Weekend 2008

On Saturday 19 April, a group of high intelligent people were gathering for a special weekend to do all sorts of activities. I’ve been asked to do a special workshop on LEGO MINDSTROMS.




14 kids in age 8 to 16 were challenged to build a robot that could collect 9 bars standing in the middle of an arena. Mindstorms was new to all the kids. Initially I explained how to build a small base robot (the 30 min retail box model) and how to do the base actions in NXT-G.
7 teams were building and programming robots for almost 5 hours.
The goal was to collect the pillars, of one color and bring them back to their base(corner). Points were given:

-1 point for pushing/ tipping the pillar over.
-3 points for bringing the pillar back to the base.
-30 points bonus, for bringing only one (of the three) colors back.
-12 points bonus for not toughing the walls of the arena.
- extra bonus points could be earned for added value (like sounds).


The best team was the Blue Bot Team with 15 points.

Considered that they had no MINDSTORMS experience at all, and 5 hours later they had build a variety of working robot, was really impressive.
Here is a presentation in dutch but with pictures.

Martyn

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