Jr Botball in Northern Idaho


Five fourth-grade students from the Mission to the Moon class competed in the North Idaho Jr. Botball competition. They chose their team names, LiFe and LiPo, from some different battery types. Once we arrived at the tournament, the group decided to adopt a Harry Potter theme because of the building's old brick look. The two in blue chose to be brothers Fred and Rob. The other three decided to be Hermione, Harry, and Draco. 
At a Jr. Botball competition, stations are set-up around the room. Students can choose which challenge they would like to attempt. When they write a program that commands their robot to accomplish the pre-determined goal, the group takes a video of the successful mission. The video is submitted to the judges who award a button and a ribbon for meeting the first challenge and then ribbons to add to the button for additional challenges.
Each group participated in a pinning ceremony consisting of pinning the button on their teammate's shirt. Challenges accomplished by either team included parking in a garage, doing the "Hoky Poky", driving around a can placed in a specific location, rolling dice and making the robot's arm touch a number to answer the addend or subtrahend of the two digits, circling two cans, and picking up a can and returning it to the starting point. Each group earned three ribbons.



Building Instructions


 I acquired my Jr Botball robots about three years ago during an iSTEM summer workshop at Lewis Clark State College and sponsored by Intel. The robots are expensive at over $500 each (https://botball-swag.myshopify.com/). The batteries cost $35 and require special care in that they should not be on the charger for more than 30 minutes. The programming language required for the robots is a form of "C." A person can also purchase a year's subscription to their curriculum, which is helpful, but you lose access to everything after a year. Although I will probably not buy more, I am glad I have these two.

The Jr. Botball robots are made from materials that have not been encased in "kid-friendly" packages. This means students handle typical motors and servos they can order from a place like the Robot Shop (https://www.robotshop.com/). The battery, however, needs to be purchased from the Botball Store. It is a specific 6.6V 2000mAh battery with an XT90 connection.

The students in the competition experienced other robotic and coding challenges giving them the confidence they needed to use this equipment (code.org, Scratch, Sphero, LEGO Mindstorms, Jimu, Arduino, and the PIPER Raspberry Pi). By the time they started using the Jr. Botball I simply needed to give them a sheet listing various command codes and ask them to complete specific challenges.


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