Howdy!
We had our first week of summer camp. This was mostly rising 4th and 5th graders without experience in IQ. There were a couple of weird scoring issues with cubes that were on their edge, but nothing worth posting on the Q&A.
The clawbot was actually pretty good at getting the green cubes on the low platform. The #1 alliance in the finals got them both up in about 10 seconds.
We have three more weeks of camp and we’ll see how they can do. I think the high score overall was around 60.
Video! Pics!
How many kids? How did you schedule, sequence “matches”?
It was just claw bots and stretches. The Stretch would go above 15" but we let that go for the first week. Surprisingly, the Claw Bot was the most effective, and a couple could do a couple of points in programming as well. The first week was for just beginners.
The summer camp is 4 weeks, starting fresh each Monday. We do a competition each Friday (I use TM with the field displays, etc…). I had 10 groups of 2 and I’ll have 13 this week coming up.
Tournament is after lunch on Friday. with 10 groups you can do a round robin. With 13… Well… We’ll see! The resets are not that bad, as the kids kind of enjoy doing it. It’s satisfying getting the balls to settle into place, and it’s not too hard.
I’m a middle school teacher and I do this for a living, so I just had to rearrange my classroom a bit to make it work.
What do you charge for your camp? When you say starting fresh do you mean a new group of campers?
Ann
Using setting for scrimmage or tournament? Just got TM.
I was wanting to have no set driver teams at first, complete individual round robin. Can’t find software for that, so I’ll have to do it manually.
You’re getting a lot done in one week. Do they build? Would you tell us your weekly schedule, day by day?
I would compare to day camps and day care in your area. It’s going to be more popular with elementary kids and I would offer an extended day option in case parents can’t get them right away.
They can sign up for each week independently. Some kids sign up for 1 and 2, some 3 and 4. It just depends. You work out the teams how you see fit.
I always do a large event by default in TM. That’s just me…
To do a round robin, you just have to figure out the number of matches. The round robin is the default behavior. You need to punch in the teams. Then, if you have 10 teams,
9+8+7+…+2+1 = 9*10/2 = 45. For n teams, n(n+1)/2.
MORE SUMMER CAMP!
Well, at the end of week two I have one big takeaway…
This game is so easy to score you can almost get a minute cycle time with two fields. You count green, red, blue, top, bottom… Some of the low scored balls were edge cases but everything else was so clear that it went really fast. That was a pleasant surprise. We did robot skills in the morning and 91 qualifications with 7 finals matches.
Very few high scored balls. No surprise there.
It is also pretty easy to get 40 programming with a modified clawbot. You can get the greens onto the platforms without too much trouble.
Getting the reds and blues with programming will be much more difficult… And while the single ball closest to the robot is easy fodder the rest will require some work… line tracking… etc…
Still no hero bot… but they are beyond that at this point. I have a few new kids next week but they will claw bot.