The FiriaLabs team kicked off National Robotics Week in style this past weekend at the Alabama Robotics Competition. It was our first time to be part of this long-running CS outreach program, spearheaded by Dr. Jeff Gray and his amazing team at UA. We look forward to many future events!
We also were the proud sponsor of Amber Merrill and her two robotics teams from Athens Middle School, sporting brand-new CodeBot CB2 rovers!
One of the great things about this competition is the focus on student coding. The challenges aren't revealed until the day of the tournament, and students have to code their solutions on the spot. No help from adults, or even the Internet (gasp!) is allowed. Also the challenges require autonomous control. No remote-control piloting, your code is on its own!
Team areas were set up to allow collaboration, coding, and configuration space. We saw some amazing creativity from our intrepid beta-testers.
Judges working tirelessly as teams bring their 'bots to face the challenges!
We also met a lot of dedicated teachers and parents at the event, and enjoyed giving demos of our famous Jumpstart Python kits. And what better event to showcase CodeBot and the first projects of our new Python with Robots curriculum also!
CodeBot is now on sale, so get your orders in to be first in line when we start shipping later this month! Meantime, we'll be sharing more "Python with Robots" posts here as we continue to celebrate National Robotics Week!
Happy Coding,
- David