Robotics : the better way; Regionals

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, April 6th, 2007

The 25th edition of Bell MRSTF was pretty cool. Basically, it is the regionals science fair for ALL the English speaking (and some french) schools in Montreal. It was 3 days long, each was very busy. On Sunday, it was routine setup, housekeeping, and some public viewing.

On Monday, for our exhibit it was action packed. For one thing, we were accused in the morning of plagarising this project off of a McGill University student. Quite odd, yeah! Of course we didn’t plagarise- the idea came out of MY head. Perhaps the guy that he was talking about plagarised it off of me, which would be funny. We had 5 judges, only about 2 of them were awkward. Since we finished being judged right at lunch, my dad took us (Anne-Marie & I) to Timmies. The food was great, and everything– but when we came back, the robot was trashed! We were told that there would be excellent security here.

After much discussion, everything seemed to go all right. On the third day, lots of people came, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to give skittles out. This basically ruined our whole marketting scheme for our project, oh well! Finally- at 2 was the awards ceremony.

We recieved 1st place, and 50$ (each) from McGill and L’ecole Polytechnique. I was quite thrilled with those! — untill, the awards from Concordia, some of which I had my eye on– went to a different project. One whom I asked: “Can I see your program?” and they said “No, it’s not on this computer. Our mentor made it though, but we understand it!”. Seeing that group win was a real heartbreaker. I coded the robot myself, in NQC. I looked up the methods and functions in the API. Why couldn’t they? Yet, they won more prize money and awards?! It basically ruined the whole Science Fair. To add to the manner, I didn’t get chosen to move on to provincials or Intel ISEF. I would have really appreciated just the mere prescence of being there at one of those science fairs. Heh, I think they seriously have some issues regarding Lego, because our project was really great.

So, if I didn’t include the sour parts of the Science Fair, it was a pretty good time. BUT, you need good shoes to be able to stand in for long amounts of time. Hopefully next year will be better!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

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