Los Altos 'Botball' Teams Sweep NorCal Competition

Contributed by Mona Shah, team parent 

The definition of a perfect spring day might be hard to find, but for four teams of students from Los Altos (29 students) along with 15 other teams from around the Bay Area, the Northern California Regional Botball Tournament at Independence High School in San Jose on Saturday, April 27th might have come close.

Three of the Los Altos teams finished first, second, and third overall, first, second, and third in seeding, first and second in double elimination, and first and second in documentation.

One team also won the Over All Judges' Choice Award and another won the Outstanding Sub-System Award. Several teams are moving on to compete in the International Botball tournament to defend their 2012 International Championship.

The Botball Educational Robotics Program engages middle and high school aged students in a team-oriented robotics competition.  Botball robots are autonomous and rely on computer programming to start, stop and maneuver on the game board. The teams build robots from a pre-defined set of parts and use a Linux based robot controller developed by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. Students program their robots using the C language. After eight weeks of planning and development, teams take their robots to the regional tournament to compete against others in the current season's game challenge. Each season presents a unique, new challenge. 

The tournament consists of a seeding round, in which each team runs its robots alone on the game board and a double elimination round, in which two teams run on the game board at the same time, competing with each other. Teams are also judged on their documentation and presentation of the process and lessons learned.

The double elimination rounds can be exciting, since it is hard to know how another team's robot can affect your robot's performance.  

Some teams are constantly trying to change their robot's strategy so that they can catch their opponents by surprise.  A case if this was when the eventual second-place team in the double elimination rounds pulled out an entirely new blocking robot that they had not used at the competition to try and foil the eventual winner's strategy   It was a bold move that almost netted them the win.

Michael Schuh, the competition announcer and local Botball team organizer said about the competition: "The Botball tournament days are my favorite days of the year.  I love seeing how intensely the students compete with their very creative and impressive robot designs.

"They are clearly having lots of fun and are fully engaged   It is heartening to spend time with such bright and talented youth."

While most Botball teams are school-based, the Los Altos team is a community team that includes students from Los Altos, Cupertino, Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale.

The teams are coached by team-member parents. The overall winners for Botball are determined by double elimination rank, seeding round scores and documentation scores.

The Los Altos teams emphasize the students learning how to build and program capable robots and working together as a team over winning. The competition provides a way to focus these activities.  

Some years, the teams build really cool robots that work well and score lots of points and other years they build really capable and impressive robots that for whatever reason don't score as well as other teams score. Often, everyone at the tournament would watch in suspense while a student-built robot would perform actions like slowly lifting rocket motor booster game pieces made of 4" long x 2" diameter PVC pipes into the air, line up, and try to position the pieces on a 30" tall pole in the center of the table - all with no human intervention.  

Most of this year's robots worked really well and the teams won an impressive number of awards.

Botball is a great opportunity for students, team leaders, mentors and parents to network and interact with others who share an interest in educational robotics. NASA is the major sponsor of Botball as method to give potential future scientists and engineers an opportunity to collaborate on a fun and creative project. For more information, visit Botball.org or LosAltosRobotics.org or contact Michael Schuh at (650) 965-8037.

Editor's Note: Los Altos Patch welcomes user-generated content such as the  foregoing because it introduces the community to events or endeavors that they may not have heard of or seen. Patch welcomes single-event submissions, with a photo or two to losaltos@patch.com and also encourages community members to blog—occasionally or frequently—about their clubs and organizations' doings.