Our twelve-strong Junior Robotic team was invited to a special outing on Tuesday 21 November in Fan Ling, New Territories. Friends at the Asia Robotics League introduced our students to a full scale competition arena and discussed the rules of the formal VEX IQ competition. After a couple of months of learning the basics of robot building, things are getting serious. 

We’ve discovered that there’s a lot more to Jr. Robotics than just building a robot. We’ll need to work as a team, practice operating skills, set goals, create strategies, communicate well with our own team and future teammates. After this competition, we’ll be “changing gears” and will be working hard on developing all these skills in the upcoming weeks.

Mr. Sunny Ma, Science & Robotics

We wanted to gain some experience seeing a real arena and understand the game rules better so that we would be able to tweak design as our robot did not meet the standards, work on timing, we would need to make sure that we are able to get from A to B.

Brandon, Grade 7

We were taught the basic idea of the games when we were there. You grab blocks and you put them into a container in the field. Each block gives you a different amount of points. We were also taught about the different ways of getting more points. These included knocking down big blocks on platforms, putting only one type of cube in each container and parking in the parking zone. We also learned that we would work with another school to put the blocks into the containers. This would mean that we would need to communicate with the other schools that we would be with in advance. To make it even more complicated, we would only have one minute to discuss and one minute to put the blocks in the containers. Every 25 seconds, we need to switch drivers. Finally, we were told that we could better design our robot to excel at certain aspects of the game. We were told that we needed to write down any changes we made because they would give us more points.

Shai, Grade 7

We had a lot of fun looking around and exploring the place. We saw a ton of cool robots and learned how things worked in preparation for competitions. 

Harel, Grade 6