FOBISIA Robotics Competition

FOBISIA ROBOTICS COMPETITION 2022

David Szelesi

Head of Design Technology, The Alice Smith School, Kuala Lumpur

Nine schools from the FOBISIA family of schools with a total of seventeen Key Stage 3 teams competed in this inaugural FOBISIA OhBot Robotics event. After an initial entry stage, the live Robotics event took place on Wednesday the 27th of April, 2022 and was hosted by The Alice Smith School, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Computer Science and Design Technology departments collaborated to stage and host the event.

Our sponsors Ohbot, a UK, Gloucestershire based, ICT in education award-winning company, provided The Alice Smith School with ‘scratch’ programmable robotic heads to showcase each team's programs.

To set the scene for the competing teams, Dan Warner and Mat Walker from Ohbot had programmed an Ohbot to deliver the set tasks to the teams: the robot head captivated the audience by speaking, blinking and moving its head to Dan & Mat’s programmed commands.

The challenge was for each team to program the OhBot to answer three out of five possible questions. Judging criteria included; functionality, expression and programming.

The clock was ticking with each team having an hour to write the ‘scratch’ programs, test the programs to ensure completion of the task as well as checking against the judging criteria. A willing team of student helpers assisted Mr Stewart Edmonds - Head of Computer Science at The Alice Smith School, to download the scratch programs from the OhBiverse online portal and output them through a robot head enabling each team to show the finer nuances of the human face and movement in a dynamic, engaging unique and exciting way.

The Year 8 co-presenters Dheeraj and Beatrix from The Alice Smith School asked the OhBots five questions. They as well as the ICT support team, onlooking visitors and students, were amazed at the degree of complexity, humour, expression and functionality evidenced by each team.

Google Meet was used by the judging panel comprising Dan Warner and Mat Walker from OhBot in the UK and Janine Minchin from FOBISIA HQ in Bangkok, and the entire event was live-streamed to participating schools through YouTube live. The judges further deliberated over the code and the results were as follows: in third place ‘Drace Robotics’, Denla British School, Bangkok, Thailand, second place was ‘Team Name’, Bangkok Patana School, Bangkok, Thailand and the winners were ‘Code Ninja's’, The British School Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The OhBot robotics final was an awesome event for the students from all schools to participate in. We are already looking forward to next year's competition.