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BOTBALL Regional Tournament 2013 

I had my best experience with robotics in March of the same year when I attended BOTBALL 2013 at Carnegie Mellon Qatar. I felt great heading my BOTBALL team consisting of nine other high school friends. Our team was divided into two subparts specific to our roles of coding and building. It took me time to get accustomed to the LEGO building kits but found adapting to C programming language 

 

easier as we were taught C++ at school. I tried my best to learn from my friends who attended the training workshop, about their ideas for the structural design of our robot. Our basic strategy was to first acquire the small points and then aim for the jackpots if we get qualified in the final rounds. We decided to collect maximum organic samples (the multicoloured fur balls), payload (sponge cube) and the BOTguy in the launch area and then use the iRobot Create to drop the transport container on these items. If this was a success and we had time remaining, we hoped to drop the sky crane retainer or the geodes with the same DemoBot that collected the items earlier in the launch area. We used 2 arms stretching out from the DemoBot to collect the items by dragging them and installed 2 digital button sensors on the arm ends to guide its movement. On the other hand, we utilized the iRobot Create with 2 strong arms and several servo motors to lift and drop the transport container on the collected items. 

We worked on our designs for a month and had innumerable run-throughs during the self arranged after-school sessions.  At the final event even though we couldn’t qualify for the final rounds we had learnt a lot from the entire experience.  I learnt a great deal about teamwork, time management, consensus building and ways to improve my programming efficiency.

My school rewarded my efforts to raise awareness about computer science among my peers, in the next student council elections by offering me the “Director of Computer Club” position. I made an effort to increase the efficacy of the computer club by having the selection procedure preponed for all the upcoming tournaments so that our team as whole  


 

could perform better with more time and better resources. The extra time has not only provided an opportunity to test the actuality of our codes but also to make use of the resources from previous participations. I also requested for a reserve in the computer lab to retain the tools and resources received during previous participations in inter school competitions.
 

During the execution of these plans, I noticed that very few females volunteered in our computer club events and their deficient attendance in CS courses offered in my high school. I tried to address this issue by motivating the girls of my batch to attend the CS4 Qatar Women events at CMUQ. I also introduced my juniors to the world of CS through workshops in the lunch breaks at school. I wish to make computer science more accessible and interesting for all my schoolmates regardless of their age or gender. 

 

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