Challenge 1
Set the mat up to competition standard and run your program once, cold, with no practice run first. Record the score.
The mission 4 min
Competition conditions. The garden set, against the clock, scored — and this time flower bed 2 at E is on the table.
Everything you need already exists. Today is not for building or for learning a technique; it is for finding out what your block of eight lessons is actually worth when nobody is allowed to help.
No coaching during a round. Once the round starts, the team may not touch the robot or the computer. Everything a teacher would normally say has to have been said beforehand — which is exactly the point of running a mock.
The whole garden, at last 5 min
Lesson 15 ran HOME to B to C to D and home again. Today the far corner is available: flower bed 2 at E, bottom right, the most remote station on the mat.
Nobody is telling you to include it. That is the decision, and it is a real one — E is worth points, and getting there and back may cost more seconds than those points are worth. You argued about this in lesson 9 without evidence. Now you have times.
Decide before the first round, write the decision down with the reason, and hold to it. Changing your mind mid-round is how teams end up with half a route.
What a round actually costs 12 min
Competition scoring is not a test of your best-ever run. It rewards the run you can produce on demand, cold, once — and those are different things.
Three costs are worth naming before you start, because each is measurable today:
- The attachment costs seconds. Every collect and release is time the robot is not driving. Lesson 10’s motor numbers tell you roughly how many.
- The follower costs or saves seconds. You have the numbers for this from lesson 12 — proportional against Block 1’s bang-bang, over the same leg.
- Setup costs seconds. Placing the robot, choosing the program, waiting for a sensor to settle. It feels free and it is not.
Points per second decides everything. The same ranking you built on paper in lesson 9 is now settled by measurement rather than argument. A mission that scores well but eats a third of the round may be the right thing to drop — and being able to say so with numbers is what a judge is looking for.
Build it — set the venue up 10 min
No robot work. Set the room up like a competition instead, because the conditions are half of what you are testing.
- Mat flat, edges taped, no creases. A ridge across a line will beat any follower.
- Lighting as it will be on the day. If your calibration was done under different light, re-run it now — this is exactly the failure lesson 4 warned about.
- Battery charged. A tired battery turns slower and every tuned number shifts with it.
- One timekeeper, one scorer, and both from a different team than the one running.
Program it — freeze it 12 min
The program should already be finished. Today’s programming work is to stop changing it and make it easy to run under pressure.
Check the main canvas one last time against the rule from lesson 15: My Blocks only, one call per action, reading in route order. If a teammate cannot find the line that runs a given mission within a few seconds, rename something now rather than in the round.
Make sure the right program is the one that starts when the button is pressed. Teams lose whole rounds to running yesterday’s version, and it is entirely avoidable.
Tune it — two minutes, one change 9 min
Between rounds you get two minutes. That is enough to change one thing and nothing more.
Decide what that change will be before the round ends, while you are watching it fail. Then make it, run again, and record whether the score moved.
This constraint is not artificial. It is the real one, and teams that practise working inside it stop making the classic mistake of rewriting three things in a panic and arriving at the next round with a program nobody has ever seen run.
Run it — the scored rounds 6 min
Round one is cold. No practice run, no warm-up lap, no last adjustment. Place the robot by your placement rule, start it, and let it go. Score it.
Two minutes. One change. Round two. Score it.
Then, separately from the scoring, time an attachment swap against the clock so you know what it would cost you if a future mat needed two of them.
The journal — closing Block 2 4 min
The last lesson of a block collects the whole block. Today’s entry has to stand on its own for a judge:
- both round scores, and the one change you made between them
- your decision about E, the reason, and — with hindsight — whether it was right
- what the attachment cost in seconds, and what the proportional follower saved, both measured against Block 1’s baseline times
- the attachment swap time
- the one thing you would change about the robot before the next mat, and why
These numbers are used again. Block 3 takes the gyro to the accumulated-error problem you met in lesson 15, and lesson 30 in Block 4 puts basic, proportional and PID side by side over the same leg. Both of those comparisons start from what you write down today.