Engaging Students in Robotics via Competition
Excitement is quickly building for the upcoming Fourth Annual Virtual Robotics Challenge sponsored by Studica. This event will be held at the 2013 Ontario Technological Skills Competition in Waterloo, Ontario. It takes place Monday, May 7th – 8th.

How the OTSC Virtual Robotics Competition Works

This year's competition will feature the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 combined with the fischertechnik Robo TX Explorer Kit using the Mazebot design by Bob Tone. The competing teams will be given the challenge to write their control program using the VPL environment of the MS RDS 4. MVPL, or the Microsoft Visual Programming Language, is a high-level intuitive graphical interface for programming which abstracts the hardware services programming into graphical objects requiring minimal knowledge of conventional programming languages, as all the objects available are placed in the graphical environment where you interconnect the object or blocks related to each activity or service in a virtual environment. Each object has attributes and functions available which can be acted upon by other objects by simply connecting them with wires.

There is also a visual simulation environment, VSE, in which the program interacts with the simulated objects that are given dynamic physical attributes like mass and velocity along with gravity, so you can actually see what happens if your run your robot into a wall or off a table. The virtual robotics challenge given to students this year will involve multi-step activities that they must complete and be graded on each. One of the activities will be the line-follower.

Judging Criteria and Preparation

One of the judges' main criteria will be looking for the team that can program the fastest most accurate algorithm for the robot to complete the course in both the simulated environment as well as using the ROBO TX hardware itself.  To prepare for the challenge teams are encouraged to download the free Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 available from Microsoft. Fischertechnik Software, tutorials and support files for MS-RDS support are available here. Good luck to all the participating teams.

Teachers looking for Robotics curriculum tied to a STEM education program, you may want to consider the new fischertechnik STEM Lab program that includes complete curriculum to fill up to six months of class time written by Tom White. This is a standards-based program that focuses on project based learning.

How to Prepare for OTSC and other Robotics Competitions