So you may have noticed that I've been neglecting the forum lately. That's because the past week, I was at the 2008 Global Conference on Educational Robotics, which hosts the International Botball Tournament. While my Botball team didn't do particularly well (we kept having minor fluke issues with the bots which ended up doing us in pretty bad), I presented three technical papers, one of which won me the 1st place trophy for Outstanding Conference Paper Submission. I also won the 1st place trophy for the Robotics Achievement Test, which is a fun competition in which the students try to score as high as possible on a multiple choice test related to practical robotics. My friends at Cedar Brook Academy from the DC area won the International Botball Tournament overall, which was spectacular (they also won last year). The final few rounds were amazing. In one, two robots tackled each other while trying to cross a bridge, and both ended up falling off. In another, a robot tried to block the bridge, but its opponent pushed itself under the first robot's blocking arm. Lots of great engineering and programming there to look at. My friends at Whittier Middle School from the Oklahoma area, in addition to having great Botball tournament robots, also had some great showcase robots there, including one which could solve a Rubix Cube.

There were teams there from outside the U.S.: Poland had two teams, and Qatar and Kuwait both had a team. Nigeria was supposed to have a team, but apparently their visas weren't approved in time. Most of the international teams did extremely well, which was nice to see.

All in all, a great week. And I have lots of ideas for more cool stuff to program before next year's season rolls around. But in the meantime, it's back to actual robotics programming that I get paid for rather than the hobbyist stuff in Botball. (My boss allowed me to skip work for the past few weeks to work on Botball... they're so nice.)