Spectators watch the annual Botball Tournament at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Meridian Ballroom in 2017. (Photo courtesy of SIUE)

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will host approximately 15 teams during the Botball Workshop set for Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 17-18 in the Technology and Management Center (TC) located in University Park on the SIUE campus.

The teams are preparing for the 16th annual Greater St. Louis Botball Tournament to be held Saturday, April 14 in the Morris University Center’s Meridian Ballroom.

The workshop is an opportunity for the teams to discuss the rules of this year’s tournament and to learn tips on building and programming their robots. Members of SIUE’s Autonomous Robotics Club (ARC) student organization will be volunteering their time to help.

“While coding is emphasized in the workshop, the Botball program is all about complex problem solving,” said Gary Mayer, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science in the SIUE School of Engineering, workshop instructor and regional event organizer. “We want to develop critical thinking skills that can be applied for success in many aspects of their lives. The Botball mentorship model focuses on the students creating and implementing solutions to the presented problems.”

Per the organization’s website, the Botball curriculum is aligned with Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Mayer says several students who were previously Botball participants now attend the School of Engineering as students.

The theme of this year’s tournament is agriculture in the Coachella Valley, out west. The overall tasks are focused on the concepts of using robotics to improve agriculture and tourism in the region. One task is to water date palms by bringing water in from aquifers. Dates also need to be harvested and sorted in preparation for sale.

The teams receive a kit with hundreds of parts such as sensors, motors and structural pieces. Students are free to be as inventive with the kit components as possible. The game board is set on an 8-feet by 8-feet table, with various PVC and material components, and additionally this year, there is a tram across the game board that teams can use.

The result is a fleet of unique robots that allow the students to see the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, especially in head-to-head competition.

Botball is coordinated through the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. The tournament event pits teams against one another in two-minute rounds. A team’s student-created robot must demonstrate its ability to perform many tasks worth varying points. The regional competition is open to the public and typically draws approximately 200 spectators with teams from Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas and Arkansas.

“The Botball Education Robotics Program is an outlet for creative minds, an opportunity to meet others with similar interests in science and engineering, and a way for the community to get involved with the students’ successes,” Mayer said.

—Teams getting prepped for Botball Tournament–