Past Events

Robogals UQ spent the day playing with cool robots, eating delicious cookies and meeting a lot of friendly people at the UQ Market Day, 2012.

The day started with the team, at various stages of being awake, arriving at our Robogals UQ club table at 8am. We started unpacking our many bags of awesome robots, decorations, banners and delicious cookies and set up our conspicuously robotic stall.

We spent the rest of the very sunny and humid day handing out fliers, drinking free ice-tea and just meeting a lot of really friendly robotics/education enthusiasts.

We welcome our new volunteers and look forward to getting to know you all!

Marnie Lamprecht

15 December, 2011

Robot delivering present (red ball) from Earth (green plateau) to Mars.

In our Christmas workshop this year we had the girls build robots that helped Santa deliver presents to Mars. Since there are no roads between Earth and Mars, we needed robots that could fly! This wasn't really possible, so for our workshop we used string for the robots to travel across to simulate the robots being in the air.

We started the day off with getting the girls to know each other by applying their expert problem-solving skills with some puzzles. We then got the girls to form groups of 2-3 around the room and went through our short robotics introductory explanation before the girls started building their robots. The robot build used in this workshop was the balancing robot.

The robot build for this workshop was a little more intricate than the other builds and so the girls took a little longer to finish building their robots. However, it was worth it - there was much excitement as the girls got their robots to balance and move on the string! When all of the girls had finished building their robots, it was time for lunch - pizza and (surprisingly popular) fruit salad.

After lunch the girls got stuck into programming their robots to pick up the presents at Earth and deliver them to Mars. The girls had a fantastic time and by the end of the day we had a lot of very happy Martians on Mars!

29 September, 2011

Girls working on their secret mission.

The theme of our September holiday workshop this year was secret spies. The girls had to build and program robots to perform secret agent tasks. The tasks started with basic movement to get the girls familiar with the robots but quickly moved in to more advanced secret tasks.

The workshop started with some activities to get the girls to know each other. We then got the girls to form groups of 2-3 and showed them a few fun robotics videos before introducing them to a few different concepts in robots; motors, sensors and the NXT brain. Once the introductory explanations were over the girls started building their robots. The robots were the simple build with the bump, sound and ultrasonic sensors.

When morning tea time hit we interrupted the girls from their robot building and showed them to where a banquet of yummy food was waiting for them - Robogals home-made cupcakes and brownies! After quickly devouring all of the food the girls raced back inside to finish building so they could start one of their favourite parts of the workshops; decorating!

The girls, with their colourful secret agents, were each given secret missions to complete. These varied between the groups but ranged from finding an object to manoeuvring around dynamic obstacles. The girls spent the rest of the afternoon, broken by lunch, working on their missions. By the end of the day we had a lot of very happy girls and Robogals UQ had their very own set of secret robotic agents!

20-21 August, 2011

Robogals UQ volunteered at the Robocup Junior competition in Queensland again this year. This year our volunteers helped with the setup and organisation of the competition. We also had volunteers on the dance judging tables and taking photographs of the competition throughout the weekend.

There was an increase in the number of teams registered this year which made it very exciting but hard to judge as all of the dances were superb.

The robots that the teams made this year for the rescue and soccer divisions varied from Lego to custom-Lego to completely custom robots. We were impressed by the level of technical knowledge that the teams displayed.

It was a very entertaining weekend and we were very impressed with the level of enthusiasm and good sportsmanship that all participants showed.