After the Explore Science competition on Friday, we headed to Rockenhausen for a 24 hour robotics competition. While the Germans didn’t join us for Explore Science, the German Robotics team did join us for the 24 competition. We were all divided up into teams, and each team had at least one German on it.
The challenge was to design, build, and program a robot that could complete a maze and drop colored blocks on their corresponding colored paper. It seemed easy enough, but we were limited by our supplies as we didn’t know beforehand that we could bring our own supplies in addition to the EV3 kits that they provided us with.
At first, everyone was fairly optimistic. Within the first hour, most people had a solid idea and had started to build their robot. However, this optimism soon faded as the hours ticked by and more problems were discovered.
Personally, my team had a hard time programming the robot so it wouldn’t run into the wall. (And spoiler: we weren’t ever able to actually fix it unfortunately.)
To keep ourselves awake, we all chugged coffee and energy drinks. As the sleep deprivation set in, our night was filled with a lot of conversation and talking. Even though we might have complained at times, the competition turned out to be a great way to interact with new people and grow closer to those we already knew.
When asked about his experience, Hunter Schaefer said, “It was rather fun; I expected it to be boring and tiring, but it was very fun—one of my favorite things I've done in Germany this far. I also got to meet some new people and socialise with friends I already knew. The challenge was well thought out and unexpected. It seemed to be the perfect difficulty for everyone participating.”
The competition came to a close at 3pm when we finally got to test our robots. Each team had two tries, and it was really cool to watch all of the other teams’ robots in action and observe how they decided to tackle the challenge.
While my team only took 9th place out of 12 teams, the overall winner of the competition was one from our group.
Despite all the fun we had, by the time we left, we were all glad to be heading home to comfortable beds (at the competition we slept on the floor) so we could catch up on all the sleep we missed during the competition.
Sunday, we went to Hambach castle and toured Neustadt an der Weinstraße. It was a lot of fun to learn about the history, but it is something that speaks better through pictures, so I’ll leave some I took below.
We’re heading to France now, and I will update you about the trip once we get back. Until then, goodbye.
(My connection is being spotty so I will upload the pictures later once I get the chance.)
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