Nandan Nair

This weekend, I participated in the 2018 Quincy Public Schools Robotics Challenge, a competition between all the middle schools (and some elementary schools). As I move to high school next year, this would be my last year doing LEGO Robotics.

The mission/theme for this year’s competition was “World Class”, which was about learning, memorizing, and performing actions. For the robot, the missions were related to some of these themes. For example, some of the missions required the robot to kick a ball in a soccer net, turn objects by 90 degrees, etc.  

For the research project, we had to find a way to make it easier for people to learn or memorize. Our team found a way to make it easy for students (or people, in general), to memorize vocabulary, through a game. The player will be given a vocabulary term. The player then had 30 seconds to say a vocabulary term that started with the last letter of the definition of the original term. If the player fails to do so in 30 seconds, they lose. This goes one until the list of words ends, and this helps the person memorize vocab in the process.

To make our robot, we wanted to make a simple yet sturdy design. Unlike in past years, where the robots we constructed were large and had trouble moving across the board, this was very thin, lightweight and could navigate even through small spaces. Our programs for the robot accomplished multiple missions in one attempt, rather than one mission at a time. This made the robot faster and more efficient. The attachments (the extensions we attach onto the main part of the robot, which performs missions) were easier to take on and off the robot which also saved a lot of time. We used gears to operate some programs which were difficult to accomplish.

To generalize, our robot was the result of years of trying, failing and essentially an end product of us learning from our mistakes. In the end, we were very successful, and were crowned champions of Quincy 2018 sweeping most of the important awards.

I would like to thank:

• Our team’s instructors, Mrs. Mastico and Mrs. Cunniff, for helping us over the past 3 years, and for encouraging us to go the extra mile, and get better.   
• My group members, for working together when we needed to and getting the job done.
• Friends and family members for all the encouragement.

These last 3 years in Robotics has been very fun for me, and it has been an honor to be a part of the Central Robotics Team.