Seeking Input on the Parallax Classroom Robot Competition Mat

We’re seeking your educational input on features we’d include on our new classroom Robot Competition Mat, focused on the cyber:bot capabilities. We’d like the Robot Competition Mat to make use of the kit’s sensors and tutorials. I haven’t shown any other competition mats to avoid setting some biases in our minds, so let’s start fresh and design this together. 

You already know our robotic focus at Parallax:

• Foundational principles of coding, circuit building, and modification of our kits. We don’t hide engineering realities behind black boxes, abstract core concepts, and use libraries the student can’t see and modify. Students code and program everything with our kits; it’s an up-close, low-level experience around mastery.   
• We’re a one or two student/robot kit model. Every student gets equal access to programing and circuit building. One can code while the other builds, and they can trade off. 
• Competitions are done inside the classroom, usually within an hour-long lab — and without fundraising and travel.

The Competition Robot Mat features should focus on things that our kits are good at doing:

• Dead-reckoning travel between different points, without sensor feedback
• Light following using phototransistors 
• Object avoidance with whiskers (physical touch), infrared emitters and detectors (wireless detection up to a foot)
• Line following and decision making with intersections, gaps, and variations of a 1″ wide black line using QTI sensors
• Locating and picking up objects with the Gripper 3.0

Combining some of these capabilities really extends the competition. For example, navigate towards the windows using light following while following a line or avoiding physical objects in the way. Or, follow the line but move objects that block the path. 

We’d like to hear from our educators! What features, colors, symbols and size would you like the Robot Competition Mat to include? What are the in-classroom kinds of competitions you are doing that could be supported by this mat? Share your ideas by reply below and we’ll get to work with a preliminary Robot Competition Mat design and continue to obtain your input.

Every educator who responds with some input gets a free Robot Competition Mat from us, too! 

Thank you, 

Ken Gracey