User:Simonwilmot/sandbox

Barclays Robotics Challenge
The Barclays Robotics Challenge is a series of educational events to promote technology awareness with young people.

The very first Barclays Robotics challenge was held in the Charles Babbage suite on the 18th October 2013. With 20 hand-built robots, 40 students aged 13-14, from 4 local schools in the Knutsford area were invited to participate in a tech awareness day in Barclays to learn how to program and understand how to solve problems using software engineering.



A team of Barclays colleagues set about supporting the children to learn how to program robots. They were set a number of challenges such as negotiating the Stonehenge obstacle course made out of giant Jenga bricks and following a line made out of duck and masking tape. The idea was to make technology accessible, fun and interesting. We tried to invite pupils who might not have considered technology as part of their GCSE or A level choices.

The Robots
The team built a set of robots and customised them to make them more appealing to children.



The robots were built from a kit by a company called 4Tronix and are based on the Arduino. They are programmed on a laptop using a C-style programming language. The code looks like this:

Code
''  for ( int i=0;i<5;i++) {     tiltCentre; forward(1000,255); delay(500); tiltUp; delay(500); } ''

A cross platform Integrated Development Environment is provided by Arduino.

The events
There have been several events hosted at Barclays sites and also seem schools in the North West of England.