Robot League – A Unique On-Line Robotics Competition

Abstract

We have successfully organized seven years of a competition in building and programming robots in Slovakia named Robotická liga (Robot League) with the motto ‘The joy of learning through solving and sharing’. The activity is deeply based in the didactic theory of Constructionism, we beleive it is one of the most genuine examples of organized constructionist activities utilizing modern on-line technologies. A side result is a set of about 80 challenges with solutions, a useful learning resource for both learners and teachers.

The competition has a unique format allowing the teams to compete remotely from their home, school or club. In other conventional competitions, the participants pay too much attention to their own performance, and the sharing and mutual learning aspect tends to be neglected.

Traditional competitions require a long preparation that culminates at a tournament, where things can easily go wrong, leading to frustrations. Our starting point was to benefit from the motivational vector that stems from competing while correcting those common disadvantages. The core of the activity lies in that it stimulates an exceptional level of creativity and provides an early and manifold feedback in a repetitive fashion. In this paper we present interesting example tasks, discuss their classification, our experiences and recommendations and feedback from the participants.