On Tuesday 28th of March, the Department of Computer Science at Brunel University London hosted the latest edition of the Adopt-A-Bot competition. This scheme has been run annually for the last 5 years, and involving teams of pupils from local London schools and international teams of pupils as well, from Romania and Nigeria.
Adopt-A-Bot teaches school pupils the fundamentals of programming, design and documentation, and does so with the help of a Finch robot, that can be programmed and adapted to a large array of scenarios and contexts. A number of prizes are available for the teams participating in the competition: best scenario for the Finch robot, best programming skills, best documentation and overall best effort.
The 2016-17 of Adopt-A-Bot was won by "Transylvania Crew": the Romanian team from the Nicolae Balcescu school in Cluj-Napoca won the overall competition, and soon they will receive a free robot from BirdBrain technologies, the company manufacturing the Finch robots.
The day was very successful: we had 7 teams from UK here at Brunel and 1 team from Romania and 1 from Nigeria both joining us via Skype. Teachers were delighted by the commitment and involvement of the pupils for the whole year.
During the final event hosted at Brunel each team had to present and demonstrate their 9 months work to a panel of 12 judges. Both Undergraduates and Postgraduate students from CEDPS were part of the jury. Although the Romanian team impressed the jury for their coding abilities, presentation skills and inventiveness, the panel was very impressed by the quality of the work produced by all the teams involved in the competition. And our students are very demanding once they started wearing their their judge's hats.
It must be said that each team benefited from the advice and mentoring of an enthusiastic pool of Computer Science undergradutes, ready to help and support them during these 9 months the teams had to build and implement their projects.
Last but not least, All this has been possible thanks to a dedicated team of academics, professionals and Student Ambassadors that seamlessly worked behind the scene to make sure that everything was organised impeccably (and some financial support from the Dept of Computer Science).
For more information contact:
Stasha Lauria
E-mail: stasha.lauria@brunel.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1895 266032
Theodora Koulouri (Lela)
E-mail: theodora.koulouri@brunel.ac.uk