We spent the morning doing a demo for the Girl Scouts Girls in Gear program. We played a modified version of Clean Sweep. We took the outer two ends of the wall and bolted them together. This then became the center section of an 8’ x 8’ field. We used just the footballs on the wall and 1/2 the number of green balls. No goals, just the balls back and forth.
We did play with two robots on a side, one was a modified square bot with claws and the other was a taller robot set up to move the footballs.
We had about 70 girls come through in 3 hours. The best were the Daisy’s (younger than Brownies) the quickly caught on to the play and were some of the most intent competitors.
For those of you looking for a smaller portable event this seems to be a winner.
Understood. If you don’t have a regulation VEX field, you could cut a 4x8 sheet of OSB (less than $10) into five 9-1/2" wide strips 8 feet long, and tack the corners together with 2x2 blocks. You then run the fifth piece down the center, and voila! a demo field for about $12 (including a couple of bucks for the 2x2 for the blocks). Include your left-over Clean Sweep balls and paint it some festive color (using paint from the returned paint shelf at your local home center, of course) and Bob’s your uncle.
we have, at our school, a few groups who work on what we call “classroom robots” they are basically juniors to robotics and have so far built the tumbler and have attached several bumpers to navigate threw a maze.
once they finished that, i suggested to do a minefield. [this is a modification of what the people at robot c have done in their cortex training videos, just so the credit goes to where it all started] we made a few modifications, we made the disposal area old elevation and/or clean sweep triangular goals, we then put the green clean sweep balls onto 2" pvc pipe cut at different lengths and the robot has to pick up the green ball off the pipe [which is not attached to the ground] and place it in one of the four triangular goals. the pvc pipe is also cut at different lengths [2,4,6,8 and 10 inches and 4 of each]
this would be a very good starting challenge for people with a junior team and needs a few skill building challenges. for driving practice and for programming.
