Competitions
Unfortunately the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) no longer holds a regional robotics contest each year in January, however they do offer an opportunity to create your own competition by creating the game and rules for you. Due to TCEAs moving away from a coding dominated toward a remote control dominated competition SHLS Rambotics will no longer participate. One of our Rambotics students put my thoughts on this switch best when he said, “If I wanna play with a remote control I’ve got a PlayStation at home, for that.” It is Shepherd’s primary goal to educate students how to use coding to solve problems and advance their coding skills so they can successfully contribute to a FTC team in High School or a future employer.
With the completion of the new gymnasium at SHLS, we will begin holding an open robotics competition annually (as long as space is available). The competition will host Texas public and private schools. It is the goal of this Robotics coach to encourage schools to offer robotics club year round, so this competition will be held each fall. It will be similar to the ERIC competition as our coach helped build that challenge. The initial competition will open registration in August 2024, unveil the game in September 7, 2024 and hold the competition Saturday, November 2, 2024. This new competition is called SHARC which stands for Shepherd of the Hills Autonomous Robotics Competition. Stay tuned here for more details.
Edgewood ISD holds a competition called ERIC (Edgewood Robotics Invitational Competition) in April. There are two divisions at ERIC: Elementary (up to 5th grade) and Middle School (6th-8th grade). ERIC has various other awards and a rather unique element that asks students to demonstrate their knowledge of teamwork and engineering on the fly. Mr. Jewell is one of the founders of ERIC and will create a similar challenge here at Shepherd once the new building is finished. ERIC is held at Brentwood STEAM School of Innovation (1626 W Thompson PL,San Antonio, TX 78226).
Spike Prime Video Links
SpikeMobile Building Instructions
The link below can be instrumental to your child’s development as a designer and coder. The purpose of the site was originally created for the LEGO NXT platform, but the builds can be adapted to any platform and the annotated coding programs can provide an enormous insight solving problems using code.
RAMBOTICS IN THE NEWS 2024!
If you would like to read the entire article by Kristina Deleon click here.