This was a brilliant workshop. It involved pairs of youngsters programming a little robot, which were are cool little buggy type cars with sensors etc, which everyone loved, they were going back and forth, turning 360 degrees etc. Our two tutors, Ramon and Heilo, taught us how to use the programming commands and how to apply these to the little robots. We were laughing so much as our robots moved, but not in the way we had thought we programmed them.
We were told “robot always does what YOU program it to do, not what YOU want it to do!” and that “90% of mistakes comes with the WRONG starting position!”.
This applied to all of us at the beginning, we had rogue robots doing what they wanted all over the floor! Our challenge was to make the robots follow the path set out by Ramon, and we had to try not to knock down any plastic trees, or any polar bears and penguins (plastic figures that crashed our party) and this was difficult enough as all the twists and turns made the programming frustrating but funny.
I don’t think one robot managed to make it all the way to the end! But we had a great time trying to do so, and Ramon and Heilo gave us the robots to play with until the end of the week! You could find the computer lovers in that room at any time as they dismantled and rebuilt the robots as much as they liked. A really brilliant workshop!
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