Getting Into Code Mode

2 May 2016Lauchlan M, Privett ‘18

The keyboards click away as fast as they can for an hour every arts afternoon as the eager Robotics students smash away at the difficult new task of coding a robot. They have been working on many unique problems throughout the year using their robots to solve them, but up until now all of those challenges have been manually controlled. In this task, it’s hands off: the robot has to do all the work. The code must be written! The students started off slowly with the teachers giving short and sweet tutorials on the basics; a lot of the challenge was self driven. The course that our robot had to complete seemed simple, but the code might say otherwise. The robot would start on a line, drive exactly 3 meters and hit a wall. It would then stop briefly, then back all the way to the start line and stop exactly where it started. It would then drive forward a short undetermined distance and do a 180 degree turn. Finishing off the challenge involved SONAR: the robots would use a SONAR device to drive back to the wall and stop precisely 10cm from the wall they first hit. With many guidelines to meet, the adolescent engineers had a lot ahead of them, but their code was finally ready to show what it can do as last week was testing time. Most people, like Tyler G, Whittall ‘16, passed with flying colours as their robots did exactly what was required. Others were just short of completing the exercise – mainly the results of novice coding. This fueled a drive for the year-end project that was newly presented to us, which will consist of more difficult coding and guidelines. “I’m really excited to complete the next challenge” said Jose P, Whittall ‘18 about our final project. So with the new term starting to really kick-in, the Robotics Team is prepared and determined to come up with even more genius ideas and solutions to the complex problems set. Lauchlan M, Privett ‘18

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