On Thursday, we went to Mannheim for Explore Science, and we competed in the tennis ball launcher competition (I can’t remember the actual name of it right now). And I didn’t think to take pictures of our different groups’ projects or to take pictures of the actual competition (sorry) so I’m going to try my best to explain it without visuals.
Basically, at the start, we were given specific distances and heights where a stand with cans on top would be placed. There were two rounds, and each round has a different placement of the stand. On each stand, there are 10 cans stacked, and the goal is to knock as many cans down as possible. Per round, each team got three attempts. Each can that we successfully knocked off the stand was one point.
Immediately, one group hit a snag after realizing the tennis balls over here are different from the ones in the USA that they had based their machine off of. Luckily for my group, we had made a catapult with a holder that could work for various sizes.
Unfortunately for us, our projects just could not compare to the sturdy, powerful projects that the other teams had. The most one of our teams were able to hit was four, and my group hit two cans. Other than that, we kept missing (except for when on our third attempt for the second round we hit the cans but not with enough force to knock them off).
Regardless, it was a lot of fun to walk around the park, do some sightseeing, all the while seeing the ingenious solutions other teams came up with to solve the challenges. (Plus we got snazzy Explore Science shirts. I will include a picture of them later.)
The competition ended at four, and then we headed back to Kaiserslautern for the rest of the day.
On Friday, we had the cosmic vacuum (ping pong ball collector) competition for Explore Science. Once again, I didn’t get any pictures, but this time, it was because there was a time crunch as we had to leave the competition (which officially started at 11:30) at 12 so we could get on the train to Kaiserslautern to pick up the German robotics students before heading to Rockenhausen for a 24 hour robotics competition.
For the ping pong collector, we had three minutes to move around a field to collect as many ping pongs as possible. There were a hundred on the field, and double points were awarded for autonomous. The best a West team was able to do was 27 balls. So not great but considering the restraints we had as we had to fit the projects in our suitcases and then rebuild them in two days, we’re all pretty proud.
Right now, we’re at the 24 hour robotics competition, and I will update you all after it gets over tonight.
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