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Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

By on January 30, 2010

Two robots are gently lowered into two adjacent corners of the competition ring—a square area divided by a central wall—by the students who built them. Facing them on the other side of the wall are two similar-looking robots. The students step back and on a signal the four robots spring into autonomous action following pre-programmed directions for 20 frenetic seconds. Some career into the central partition successfully knocking miniature rugby balls off their stands into the opposition’s side. Others sweep smaller plastic balls through a gap at the bottom of the wall. Then as suddenly as they started, they freeze. The teams, working in pairs against each other, assess the state of play as they take up their controllers and begin a further two minutes of gladiatorial battling in their attempt to propel as many balls as possible to the other side. Some use rotating plastic strips to sweep up smaller balls into a hopper with the aim of dumping them over the wall. One of the ASIJ robots employs an elegant arm that grabs the fallen rugby balls and deftly drops them over. At the end of the two minutes the judges tally the scores, counting the balls and noting who got the large white bonus ball into their opponents court. The first game of Clean Sweep is over and the first VEX Robotics Competition to be held in Japan has really begun.

Teams from schools in California, Hawaii, Texas and Kyoto brought their machines to The American School in Japan to compete in an exciting full-day tournament. Observers from Kinnick, Yokota and St. Maur joined the audience to watch the first competition of its kind for schools in Japan.

“The world is poised for a second wave of the technological revolution. A big part of that revolution will be in robotics,” says ASIJ’s chemistry teacher Don Chambers, who spearheaded the move to bring the competition to Japan. “If the first International Symposium On Robotics in Science and Technology Education held in Yokohama in October, 2009 is any indication, China, Russia, the Middle East, as well as Europe, all of South East Asia, and India have all invested significant resources into developing robotics in education. In fact, the Japanese Monbukagakusho (Department of Education) recently declared that, within three years all Japanese middle schools will include robotics as a required part of the curriculum.  We know that what is developed in middle school moves on to high school and from there to all of society at large.”

 

The development of robotics curricula is not restricted to Japanese schools, with international schools now discovering the positive educational impact of such programs and competitions. “We need to produce more engineers and young people who can work together and solve problems and robotics teams provide students with hands-on experience that takes the content that is learned in the classroom and uses it on the playing fields,” says Nancy McIntyre, Project Director of Eagle Engineering at Chaminade College Preparatory School in California.

“Although scholastic robotics is played like a sporting event with mechanical devices, one glaring difference is that robotics emphasizes collaboration and sharing. In FIRST Robotics, this is referred to as ‘gracious professionalism.’ In programs like VEX where you play each match with another team, this sharing of ideas and collaboration is critical as your opponent in one match could become your alliance partner in the next,” says Art Kimura of the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium, who joined the visiting Hawaiian teams at ASIJ. “We have been to many robotics tournaments where teams are sharing parts, tools and even their programming, often sending their team members to help others.”

The collaborative element of the VEX Competition soon became evident on the day as the 13 teams from different schools worked together in alliances against each other. ASIJ’s four teams also found themselves helping each other as they tweaked robots and the computer programs they’d written to control them throughout the day. “In our first game, the robot was not able to exit autonomous mode because our arm got stuck on the wall. The program was designed to bring the arm down until it hit a sensor in the middle of the robot, but since the arm never came down, the program just kept on waiting for the arm to come down, as the arm control motors kept on spinning, wearing down the axle connections and the motors themselves. Not a pretty sight!” student Alex Kahl wrote on his blog.

Once their teething troubles were fixed, ASIJ’s teams put in a strong showing. Despite being rookies, ASIJ’s students performed well with two teams making it all the way to the finals after they saw off many of the more experienced teams during the quarter and semi-finals. With two teams through to the final it was natural that the ASIJ robots would pair up to make an alliance to take on two rivals from Waialua High School. Charlotte Lee, Chas Forelle and Sujoy Bhattacharyya joined forces with classmates Alex Kahl  and Jeffrey Nelson. The final match was a dramatic test of both school’s machines and nerve as the controllers worked hard to score points against each other. After two-minutes of intense activity, ASIJ prevailed to the delight of the home crowd and ASIJ walked off with both teams as tournament champions. Things got even better when the awards were presented and one team were presented with the Excellence Award as well. Their win qualifies both teams to go to the World Championship Competition in Dallas, TX, where they’ll be the first international school team from Japan to compete.

The competition focused the attention of many throughout the community with teachers from several other schools and parents expressing interest in the program. Going forward, planning has already begun for next year’s competition, which will be held at ASIJ on November 5, 2010 and it is hoped that more local school teams will be able to participate next year.

The development of robotics programs in international schools provides a powerful way to encourage science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) as well as community involvement. “We need to get teachers to think about robotic solutions to real world problems in order to see the vision of robotics as another phase of the technological revolution,” says Chambers. “They need to see that thinking of robotic solutions is thinking out of the box, and that through programs like this our young students have been prepared in many ways to do just that.”

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