Post K12 robot tournaments

[Andrew Schuetze]

Howdy to all,

As a tool to potentially expend the pool of robot team mentors, develop program awareness, and advance interest in robotic systems in general...
the Texas Institute for Educational Robotics is considering starting an adult robot league
Concept is simple in theory, hobbyists, companies, ... could enter robots into a tournament style event with additional skill challenges. This would be akin to a bowling or softball league play. I posted this in the off-season area as it would likely be run in the summer / off-season for most educational robotics events.

I am posting in hopes of starting a dialogue with folks who have done something like this before. I know that NURC is open to anyone and they award trophies for each division. The simplist means of organizing the event would be to replay a current robot game with modified rules.

Please post or get in touch with myself or Sean Kelly (Timeout 42) if you can share some advice or information on how to go about setting something like this up.

APS

[Rich Kressly]

robotevents.com has a lot of tools you may be able to take advantage of ...

[lynca]

Sounds like a great idea.

Take a look at a couple other adult robot groups around the country for ideas. If you create a rule subset that revolves around these other competitions, you should have more participants.

DPRG - RoboRama ,
Seattle Robotics Society - Robothon
ChiBots - Chibotica

[Andrew Schuetze]

Thanks for the references Andrew and Rich! I've sent out some initial invitations to local roboticists. (BEST, FRC, FTC mentors and organizers) I will host an informational meeting of the minds the week of Aug 10th. If either of you happen to be in the area and want to join us, send me a pm or email and I'll give the details and you are more than welcome to join us. RoboMegellan had fallen off my radar scope but that along with some skill challenges might be simple enough to set up and provide some breadth of challenges to attract a variety of members.

My rough idea is to conduct quarterly membership meetings and run the main competiton(s) in July or August. K12 students could enter, if they have access to robot kits. I don't see this as duplication of BEST or FIRST goals and as a vehicle to develop new mentors and sponsors as well as be another piece to the public awarness campaign. Need to have STEM and robotics in the news all year round.