Robotics

• 2008 Climate Connections We won the Research Project Award at the UK final in Loughborough.

We have not yet converted the pages from our previous seasons to this site but you can still read about our adventures on our old site:

• 2007 Power Puzzle We went to the Open Asian Championship in Tokyo, Japan.
• 2006 NanoQuest We went to the UK final in Birmingham.
• 2005 Ocean Odyssey We went to the Open European Championship in Eindhoven, NL.

In the preparation phase before a tournament, each team must:

• Build a robot from LEGO Mindstorms and program it to take part in the robot game.
• Research a project about transportation in a community defined by the team.

At a tournament, each team must:

• Run their robot against another in the robot game.
• Explain their robot's technical features (engineering and programming) to a team of judges.
• Deliver a presentation of their project about transportation to a team of judges.
• Discuss teamwork and the process of working on the challenge with a team of judges.

The team was very happy when the robot performed well enough on the table to scrape into 8th place after the qualifying rounds. In the quarter-finals, we managed the best score we have ever achieved in all five seasons: 330 points, 10 short of our possible maximum. At this point we were in first place in the robot game. Unfortunately, it fell apart again in the semi-finals and only scored about 190.

It was a great tournament with very stiff competition. Congratulations to TSM Roboteam who were the overall winners and are off to the World Festival, Atlanta. Congratulations also to the other three teams heading for Istanbul and the team going to Taiwan.

The full list of winners is now available on the FLL UK site. There were 13 trophies so 12 of the 25 participating teams went home with an award.