A Little About My WRO Experiences...

I have to confess why I was absent for a few months earlier this year.  I was one of the extremely fortunate people who got to go to the World Robot Olympiad in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.  It was truly one of the best times of my life, but it wasn’t without lots and lots of work and planning.  It’s that work and planning which kept me away.

It was an incredible display of cooperation between people of many, many countries and cultures.  I have never been part of something so diverse, so wide spread, so incredible.  Every moment was an experience that I will forever treasure.  Literally, one moment I would be speaking to someone from China, then Oman, then Egypt, then Brazil, then the Phillipines, then Syria, and on and on.  We all had one big thing in common, which I share with you; the love of LEGO robotics, the thirst for learning and the excitement of being a part of something so big.  Everyone was happy.

I got to take my big Four Lego Delta Robots setup, which was itself a feat.  I had to break it down into about one hundred small parts and pack it into eight boxes.  Then the shipping company, DHL broke it down into about 500 more pieces during shipping so I had to spend almost a full day fixing it.  I got it to work and it actually worked the whole show without many problems.  And a note to you about shipping robots, don’t expect that it won’t arrive in the same number of pieces that you packed it.  It will be broken.  ;)

I was diligently working on a robot to take, but due to some technical difficulties I wasn’t able to take it.  I am still working on it so I don’t have any videos, but I think you will like it.  It’s similar in style in that it has tons of movements which require lots and lots of mathematical calculations.  It’s those calculations which I wasn’t able to solve (and still to this day haven’t been able to completely debug.)  But I am absolutely driven at this point to get them solved….I am soooooo close.

Michael Brandl, one of the other MCPs who attended the WRO has put together an outstanding web page showing all the information about the WRO, what we did, where we went, what we ate, when we went to bed and woke up…Ok, maybe a little bit of exaggeration.   But it’s a great scrapbook that I will be showing off for years to come.

If you ever get the opportunity to attend something like this, do whatever you can do to get there.  You will be blessed.