EV3 Robotics›Level 4 · WRO Prep›Lesson 48
Level 4 · Lesson 48 · EV3-L04-4860 minutes · Block 6 of 6 · Mat: WRO 2026 — Robot Rockstars
The final tournament — and the journal is scored too.
Two deliverables today, marked separately. The robot runs the 2026 set under tournament conditions, and the journal is submitted to a judge who reads it.
The journal is not written today. It has been written since lesson 1 — forty-eight entries of decisions, numbers and things that went wrong. Today it is assembled and handed over. A judge can tell the difference between a record kept as you went and a document produced this morning, immediately and every time.
Everything on this season’s mat: the concert stage at A, the tour trucks at B, the café at C, the park strip at D, the main plaza at E, from HOME in the bottom-left corner and back.
Run the route you costed in lesson 41 and rehearsed in lesson 46. Today is not the day to attempt the mission you cut seven weeks ago.
Two scored rounds per team. Full ritual each time. Two minutes and one change between them — the tournament allows it, so today allows it. Independent timekeeper and scorer.
Not neatness, and not length. A judge is looking for evidence that decisions were made rather than arrived at.
Keep the failures in. This is the most useful advice in this lesson. The instinct is to present only successes. But the gain table that proved no single gain worked, the windup that threw the robot across the mat, the round where certified settings did not hold — those pages are the evidence that you were engineering. A journal of unbroken success reads as fiction, because it is.
Put it in an order a stranger can follow. Six sections, one per block, is the obvious structure and it matches how the work actually happened.
Add two pages at the front, and these are the only things written today:
A contents page. A judge has a few minutes. Make the key evidence findable — the ranked mission table, the design justification, the reliability numbers.
A one-page summary. What the robot does, why it is built that way, and how you know it works. Three short paragraphs. Write it last, because you can only write it once you can see the whole thing.
Then check the questions you could not answer in lesson 47. Every one of those is a gap a judge already found once. Fill what you can in the time you have — that list was yesterday’s homework and this is the last hour it can be acted on.
Nothing changes. Confirm, in this order:
Resist the last-minute improvement. The single most common way a good team loses a final round is a change made in the twenty minutes before it, untested, to fix something that was not actually broken. What you have was proved over two blocks. Run it.
Between your two rounds you get two minutes and one change. By now you know how to choose it, and lesson 46 measured how good your instinct is.
Make the change, run round two, and record whether the score moved. Write that down as well — a judge reading how a team diagnosed a failure under pressure is reading the best page in the journal.
Journals are handed in before any robot runs. The judge reads them first, so that a good round cannot flatter thin documentation. That is how real judging is ordered and it is the only fair way to do it.
Round one, cold. Full ritual: place, power up the chain in the written order, calibrate, fit the module by its card, choose from the menu, read the selection back aloud, start, hands off. Scored and timed.
Two minutes. One change. Round two. Scored and timed. The better of the two rounds counts.
After each round, read the robot’s own summary off the screen and compare it against the scorer’s sheet before the mat is cleared.
Write it after the tournament, and write it honestly:
Forty-eight lessons and six mats. You started with a follower that only knew two states and finished with one you can tune from first principles. You started with one program per route and finished with a menu that runs any mission in the set. You started with a robot that stopped when something went wrong and finished with one that carries on. None of that arrived in a single lesson, which is why the journal is worth as much as the run — it is the only place the whole thing is visible at once.
This model drives, so its challenges are run on a mat. Mats differ between branches — check you are looking at the one in your room.
WRO 2026 RoboMission Elementary — Robot Rockstars · official WRO game mat, 2362 × 1143 mm
The challenges name these places rather than distances, so the same challenge works on any mat:
Switch mats above and every route below is redrawn on the mat you chose.
Work through the challenges in order — each is harder than the last. The mission comes after all three, and it is meant to make you plan before you build.
Assemble the journal into an order a stranger can follow — six sections, one per block — and write the only two pages written today: a contents page, because a judge has a few minutes and the key evidence must be findable, and a one-page summary of what the robot does, why it is built that way, and how you know it works. Then fill the gaps from lesson 47.
KEEP THE FAILURES IN. The gain table that proved no single gain worked, the windup that threw the robot, the round where the certified settings did not hold — those pages are the evidence you were engineering. A journal of unbroken success reads as fiction, because it is.
Confirm and change nothing: the right program on the Brick, all Bricks charged, the six initialisations present, every recovery still ending in abandon-and-continue, the ritual written and in hand, modules and cards on the table. The commonest way a good team loses a final round is an untested change made in the twenty minutes before it, to fix something that was not broken.
Hand the journal in BEFORE any robot runs, then compete two scored rounds with two minutes and one change between them, the better one counting. Afterwards write the last entry: both scores, the change and whether it helped, the judge's feedback verbatim rather than summarised, and the one thing you would do differently with another eight weeks. Forty-eight lessons and six mats — from a follower that knew two states to one you can tune from first principles, from one program per route to a menu, from a robot that stopped when something went wrong to one that carries on.