As team member Ryan Fox describes it, teams build and program a robot to perform \u201ccertain missions\u201d relating to four different areas \u2013 robot game, robot design, innovation and core values.<\/p>\n
Taradale Intermediate’s robotic team (from left) Kian Balhorn-Robertson, Fareed Rashid, Ryan Fox and Hunter Cameron head off to compete in South Korea in July. Photo \/ Jack Riddell<\/p>\n
Each mission gets teams points and whoever has the most points at the end wins.<\/p>\n
The team are currently building the robot they will take over to South Korea at their school.<\/p>\n
The robot, named Kitsune after a trickster fox from Japanese folklore, features two movement motors, tyres from a toy tractor, two colour sensors and extra attachments for each mission.<\/p>\n
Hunter Cameron said rather than delegating team members specific jobs, building Kitsune was a team effort to make sure \u201ceveryone can do everything\u201d before the competition.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Havelock North High School\u2019s robotics team are off to Niagara for the Canada Cup of Robotics in June after finishing as champion finalists in the First Tech Challenge New Zealand Championship in Hastings in December with their robot Shaq O\u2019Steel, named using a play on words of basketballer Shaquille O\u2019Neal.<\/p>\n
The First Tech Challenge involves high school-aged teams competing head-to-head by designing, building, and programming a robot to compete in an alliance format against other teams.<\/p>\n
Team member James Maxwell said the competition involves a two-and-a-half-minute game where \u201cthere\u2019s both controlling and autonomous parts\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fellow team member Max Atkin said the first 30 seconds of the game is the autonomous period \u201cwhich is all hands off\u201d, where the robot goes off its sensors and pre-programmed routes. <\/p>\n
After that, two drivers operate the robot.<\/p>\n
In Canada, the team and a new yet-to-be-named robot will compete against other teams in a game where the robot will have to shoot coloured balls into corresponding colour nets, earning points for the right colour order or delivering the ball into the net.<\/p>\n
The team are currently training three times a week, but that will ramp up closer to June.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe spend a lot of long nights trying to get it to work very close to the competition,\u201d James said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019ll be 80 teams from across the world. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019ll be a much higher level competition for us than what we\u2019re used to at nationals.\u201d <\/p>\n
Despite the nerves which going up against world-class competition brings, the team said they were excited and were feeling quietly confident about their chances.<\/p>\n
Brendon White, from Hawke\u2019s Bay Robotics Trust, said robotics had been growing in the region and Hawke\u2019s Bay could be proud as its young innovators prepared to take on the world, and \u201cshow them what Kiwis can do\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke\u2019s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As team member Ryan Fox describes it, teams build and program a robot to perform \u201ccertain missions\u201d relating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[95,1975,674,39789,3685,3273,1437,47034,1976,111,139,529,69,90,48211,175853,175855,122283,13810,175854,213,14446,3767,85464,223,2846,9873,61,810],"class_list":["post-326401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-and","tag-at","tag-building","tag-compete","tag-events","tag-future","tag-global","tag-havelock","tag-hawkes","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-ones","tag-precipice","tag-presentday","tag-proving","tag-robotics","tag-robotreliant","tag-sports","tag-stand","tag-students","tag-taradale","tag-the","tag-them","tag-theyll","tag-to","tag-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}