Robofest is a robotics programming and building event created by Lawrence Technological University. Acadia University is one of their many partners, and as such, we host a Robofest event every year here on campus. This year, it will be held on Saturday, February 16th. Robofest is aims to encourage high school students to take part in building and programming robots. Each year, there is a unique game for Robofest – this year, the game is called “Binary Blocks”. The objective is for each team’s robot to be able to construct a binary number using black and white tissue boxes to represent “0” and “1” respectively, then stack the remaining boxes vertically. This year, the world champions “Royal Robots” from Annapolis Royal, N.S. will be looking to defend their world champion title. The team placed 1st in the Unknown Mission Challenge and 2nd in the Robot Game, at the ROBOFEST World Festival in Michigan in May 2018.
Robofest is important to the community as it provides a hands-on opportunity for high school students to learn skills they would otherwise not be exposed to in the classroom. Academically, it teaches engineering through the building of the robot itself, and computer science is used to program it. The event also teaches them to work together and cooperate as a team. Teams come from all over the Maritimes to Acadia University to compete, and they all come with innovative solutions for robot building and programming. The energy and ingenuity the students can bring to this event is unrivaled, and it will be amazing to see what they come up with to solve this year’s challenge. Acadia University and its surrounding community members/organizations supply over one hundred volunteers for this event. It is an exciting day that brings many people of all ages, backgrounds and fields of study together.
For more information see : https://www.facebook.com/AcadiaRobotics/ or https://robots.acadiau.ca/id-2016-17-championships-information.html
