Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto VEX

I wanted to use the title Gundam VEX Style somewhere after missing out on my last post.   But changed my mind. Again.

That's K's physics teacher beside him.  He looks young.  Like a student.  We wish K would sit up and stand up straight and not so much like a lurch.

We were at the Markham Pan Am Centre for a VEX Robotics competition.  First off this place is really nice!  It was the badminton and table tennis venue for the 2015 Pan Am Games.  It's also got Olympic sized swimming facilities on the opposite side of the building.

Today was for the older kids.  The day before was the U-10 kids.

It's also down the road from my buddy Gjouch, and he's a tech-propeller head like me, so I messaged him to let him know what's going on in his hood, and to bring some food. We thought this would be a drop-off, but our curiosity got to us and we stuck around and glad we did.

I said - if they point to a spilled Tim's double double and say something in broken Engrish. It's cuz the only other white person was the custodian.  Don't be offended.  Just walk on like you didn't hear it and look for me and my round head in the bleachers.   I hadn't seen his mug in real life in a long time so it was good to see him. 

This was K's crew.   They were still putting the finishing touches on their robot.  Actually they were still building it and writing code to run it.  Honestly, it looked like a dud, compared to the mobile self-cleaning dishwashers all the other asian kids had built. 

It may not have been able to do some of the advanced skills like the other robots in the competition, but this isn't a 1 dimensional competition.  There's many ways to get points.

And they actually did quite well. They exploited the points scoring to their advantage.  Accumulating as much as possible to defeat their robot opponents.

History has demonstrated that it isn't always the most technologically advanced product that wins out.  It's the one with the best strategy.   To these jokers credit, strategy was their friend.  I was impressed.  And they were surprised too.  Their Mr. Roboto went from Zero to Hero.

Good for these boys!

Check out this team's robot.  One of the skills is to pick up those yellow plastic discs and get them into that basket.  The screen shots are a sequence of that robot launching a disc from it's hopper and hitting the chains and landing in the basket.  We were wow'd, but the kids watching looked so unimpressed, like it was - Ah, ours cleans, dries and puts discs back in cupboard, and takes garbage out too.

I'm not sure how much time they had.  Maybe 10 mins per match, but some were rapid fire.  Launching 3 into the basket.  It was impressive.  And prior to the driver round, there's an autonomous round where it operates on it's own.  Those rounds weren't as impressive, but still that is a big challenge to meet, and they did move around.

There were all girls teams which was nice to see.

K's school has. Robotics club, and I requested to join.  K's friend D brought it to his attention - Hey your Dad just requested to join the club! But I got denied.   K hit the deny button.

I coulda helped them build something that didn't look like a hack.  It's about a $Grand for a VEX starter kit, but I saw they have some VR sandboxes where it's free to write code to control a robot.  I may just do that.

I mean, if I got one, T will just say the same thing she always says when I get something like this.  "What are you going to do with all this?"

She said the same thing when I bought my first set of tools, and bit by bit I learned the skills to renovate our home.  I actually said the same thing before I got my 3D printer.  But I found many uses for that thing too.  Moral of the story.  Need stuff to do stuff.  But also need some purpose and gumption.  Otherwise, the stuff will collect dust.  And you'll fail.  It's how you learn.

This might be more out of the box thinking on usefulness.  But plant the seed and make the technology available to everyone and I could see how the stuff I saw today with these kids could potential help our planet.

I saw the future today.  And it gave me hope.