Explorer Post 1010: Botball 2017

Explorer Post 1010 had two teams registered in the 2017 Botball Educational Robotics program. We formed our teams in January 2017 and the game for 2017 was revealed. We sent several members to the Botball Workshop at Maryland University in College Park on Saturday/Sunday, February 4/5. Here are the Workshop Slides. The next week we kicked off eight weeks of intensive robot development, culminating in a regional tournament. We built a complete game table in our Johns Hopkins lab room. Following the regional tournament, we prepared for and attended the Botball Global Conference on Educational Robotics in Norman, OK in early July.

At the end of the project in August, 2017, we came up with a list of improvements for the program and our team's efforts.

Our Teams

17-0160	17-0161
Aine Kenwood Anne-Michelle Lieberson Devin Frost Hayley Goddard Jacob Barats Kiara Jackson Samuel Du	Anthony Rabinovich Dominic Gagliardi Elvin Liu Jasper Li Jennifer Moy Michael Bock Sophia Lieske Yoga Rajamani

Regional Tournament
The DC regional tournament was held on Saturday, April 1, 8am to 7pm, at Annandale High School in Annandale, VA. Our teams did OK, but only had average scores in documentation, seeding, and double elimination. Team 160 came in 12th overall and Team 161 came in 9th overall out of 25 teams. Here are the awards, the seeding scores, and the raw overall scores.

Regional Videos
160 Seeding 1 (68MB); 160 Double Elimination 1 - win (83MB)
161 Seeding 3 (70MB); 161 Double Elimination 1 - lost (73MB)

The Game Board
Table

Global Conference and Tournament
Team 161 entered the Global Conference on Educational Robotics, held in Norman OK, July 7 to July 13. Our team did poorly in the seeding rounds, seeding 53rd out of 64 teams. But in the double elimination, they did great ending up 4th. They came away with a nice trophy. Here are the raw data for GCER - seeding rounds, double elimination, and overall scores.

At the conference three of our students presented a paper on their research in robotics. Here is the paper.

GCER Videos
Seeding Round 1 (76MB); Double Elimination Round 3 (60MB)
Final DE Round 2 (87MB); Double Elimination Round 5 (80MB)

We also had an adult team (Hole in One Gang) entered in the KIPR Open robotics competition held during the conference. We won the seeding rounds and all our double elimination rounds (awards). We won the first place overall trophy. We considered entering a team in the Aerial Robot competition but just didn't have enough interest.

KIPR Open Videos: Seeding Round 2 (65MB); Double Elimination Round 4 (104MB)

Our GCER Team Slide KIPR Open Table