The Wave, part 1 – The Wedge

This week we’ve been doing a challenge known as The Wave (inspired by this post by Ian Chow-Miller).

The idea is to have the robots start in a line, wait until they hear a loud noise (e.g. “Go!”), and then move in formation. Ultimately we’ll work up to moving in a wave formation, but we decided to start with a wedge shape. In following lessons, we’ll extend the routine to have the robots return to the start line and then move in other patterns. The programming is pretty simple, but getting a group of 20 or so 16- to 18-year olds to figure out how to organise themselves, not so much.

This video shows where we got to be the end of the first, 60-minute, lesson.

This was only their third test run… and the deal was that if this worked, then they could go to lunch!