International Autonomous Robotics Competition (www.IaRoc.org)

International Autonomous Robotics Competition (www.IARoC.org)

The competition is gearing up for June 21st and 22nd at the Del Mar Fair and we have lots of work to do! Let me back up a bit tell you have I got involved in this competition. First off, robots are cool! And thinking robots are cooler than remote controlled robots! A while back when I was teaching Java at UCSD Extension one of my students, an elderly gentleman, told me why he was taking Java - he wanted to start a school teaching programming to kids. Well, after about a year, I ended up being on the board of directors at Wintriss Technical Schools (http://www.wintrisstech.org), founded by Vic Wintriss. As such, I've been involved in teaching middle school and high school kids how to program using the Java language; this is quite rewarding when they get it. We wanted to have the kids do something cool and robot kits seemed to be coming into affordability so we decided to have a competition, but not on building a robot but on programming it to do stuff and the first IARoC was born. We've got a basic web site up explaining the competition http://www.iaroc.org and have a few entrees already. We even have Eric Arseneau on our board helping out with Sun SPOTs, http://blogs.sun.com/eric/

The competition is open to all but only the first 21 can compete, so don't delay!

Happy Programming,
Paul