Two-day national robot olympiad begins tomorrow

More than 1,000 students will participate in contest to select teams for World Robot Olympiad

The Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge (Adek) will conduct the national level of World Robot Olympiad (WRO) today and tomorrow to select teams that will participate in the WRO international competitions.
The WRO is scheduled for November 16-18 in Chiang Mai in the northern part of Thailand.
More than 1,000 Grade 1 to 12 students from across UAE schools will compete in the national contest themed 'Food Matters'.
This year's national contest will challenge youngsters to design, build and program robots that support the way we grow, share and consume food.
"Each year, WRO offers challenging and age-appropriate competition opportunities for students aged 6 to 18 and it's great to see them include such ingenious ideas for the younger children. Each competition category has its own exciting and unique characteristics, ones that students learn a great deal from due to its hands-on and critical thinking requirements," said Dr Najla Al Naqbi, educational technology expert, innovation and eLearning manager at the Adek.
The projects are expected to focus on sustainable development through aspects such as promoting sustainable agriculture, improving nutrition, achieving food security or ending hunger
The annual UAE contest has a new category for children up to 10 years old known as the 'WeDo Challenge' which involves collecting and sorting fruits. The other categories include the WRO Football Category, WeDo Regular Category and the Open Category whereby each robot is expected to contribute to one of the goals of the world-wide United Nations sustainability goals, such as ending hunger.
According to the WeDo Regular Category game description, the challenge is to make a robot that can help collect and sort fruit and bring the "perfect" fruit (shown as red apples) to a grocery store and the "ugly" fruit (shown as blue apples) to a juice factory. Each team is expected to build and program a WeDo 2.0 robot that the team can use to complete a series of tasks within a Game Table. The tasks are to collect and sort four pieces of fruit placed on a Game Mat and transport the fruits to different locations depending on their appearance. Each team will use their robot to perform the tasks within two minutes.
The competition, due to take place at the Mubadala Arena in Abu Dhabi, marks the 10th anniversary for Adek's annual national WRO, which has accommodated more than 10,000 students to date from across both public and private schools in the UAE.
ismail@khaleejtimes.com
 

• Abu Dhabi