Congratulations to Lydia in Upper 5, who has won first prize in a competition run by VEX Robotics UK. In this article, Lydia writes about her interest in coding and her entry for the competition:
Coding is hard; or so I thought as I sat at my desk, reading Miss Percy’s email about another competition that I knew I would convince myself I would enter, spend ten minutes on and then forget about forever. Daring to believe that I was going to be productive in quarantine, however, I clicked on the link in the email that took me to the Rapid Steam Lab website. A relatively uninspiring webpage opened up on my screen, with a paragraph explaining the details of the competition. My eyes were drawn away from the bullet-pointed instructions, and onto a small instructional video at the bottom of my screen. Nine minutes of an unknown man explaining the functionality of a non-existent robot later, and my week was instantly planned. I would be focused on the task of getting a little, virtual reality robot to draw whatever I wanted it to. I was Banksy, I was Da Vinci, I was Dali all at once. Armed with only the four colours of a Bic pen, I was going to create virtual art!
It would be fair to say that I got ahead of myself. It would be more than fair to say that my first attempts were not Da Vinci worthy. The challenge used a form of Scratch 3.0 (a basic coding programme, based on squeak, that visualises your code), to control the robot, which I decided to name Gerald for no good reason. My last encounter with Scratch was a Year 5 ICT lesson in which I attempted to make a stick man walk across a screen and failed dismally. The six years of life between that anecdote and this one, however, have taught me not to admit defeat too early, even if your virtual robot glitches through the virtual floor on your first few attempts.
Two days, and several virtual experiments later, I was ready to draw something; but what? In art, the possibilities are always endless, but having only black, blue, red and green to work with, and no ability to cover large areas, the endlessness did appear to end a little sooner. I find food helps the brain (or so I tell myself), so I went and had lunch with my family. When my brother bit into a BabyBel cheese and started to giggle, inspiration hit me……. ‘PacMan’, he declared, ‘It looks like PacMan’. So that is what I drew, and so, you could say everything that followed was thanks to my brother and his love of BabyBel cheese.
As I was working, gradually inputting every command into my subservient, non-existent robot, an issue began to arise…… Saving. You, I’m sure, have the sense to realise that saving is important, and so will understand how concerned I was, the first time an error message flashed up when I hit save. “Error, this action may lead to the restarting of this page. Do you wish to proceed?” questioned my computer. Seeing no choice but to save, I agreed to my computer’s threatening demand, and was appalled to see my screen instantly turn black. I experimented a few more times with methods to save but found that, no matter what I did, it ended with a crashed computer. To make matters worse, if my computer ever turned off, the same happened, and I lost all of my work. But I told myself it was fine. If I kept my computer constantly in sleep mode when I wasn’t working, and never took it off charge, nothing could go wrong, right?
Fast forward a few days and I finished my best attempt at a still image from the original ‘PacMan’. Excited at the prospect of entering my week-long project into the national competition, I sent a screen shot of what Gerald the robot had drawn, following my code, off to Miss Percy to be entered on the national stage. Content, I left my laptop unattended at my desk and went off to have lunch. All seemed well, until an email on my iPad from Miss Percy, required me to return to my desk and send her my code to be entered alongside the picture. Horror filled me as I looked down at the blank, black screen of my laptop, crashed and unplugged so that my brother could charge his phone. It was all gone. A week of programming Gerald, virtual robot, and now I couldn’t enter.
I had been taking screen shots of my code throughout for my own reference, but they were poor quality and couldn’t be used to run the program without being transcribed. I sent these pictures off to Miss Percy, hoping that at least she could see my work, even if it couldn’t be submitted. I consoled myself by reflecting that the purpose of the challenge was to learn a little more about coding and to have some fun. It wasn’t like I was going to win anyway. The point was to learn, and I learnt. That was the end of the matter.
At least, I thought so. You can see more text on the page, so you know I’m not quite finished. An email from Miss Percy popped up in the side of my screen a few days later. ‘Congratulations Lydia, you won’.
I know it may not be the most eloquent response, but my instinctive reaction was ‘WHAT!’, I thought my submission was not even acceptable, I had been teaching myself a lesson of learning for the sake of it and so losing work didn’t matter. But no, apparently, VEX (the company that set the challenge) accepted my entry, and thought it was alright. Brilliant! Two for one, personal growth and a prize!
You can tell the people at VEX know the kind of people who enter a coding competition, by the parcel that arrived on my doorstep the next day. “Congratulations Lydia, here is your build your own robotic arm prize”. I feel sorry for my family, who sacrificed the kitchen table to my construction work for four and a half hours that afternoon. I’m not sure what my nerdy heart finds more exciting; the time spent building the arm, or the fact that I have a robotic arm sat on the other side of the table as I write this.
I started by saying Coding is hard. I will finish by saying anything is hard if you haven’t tried it. I won’t claim that coding is easy for me yet, but the more I work on it, the easier it becomes. This challenge was a gateway, showing me a world filled with even more possibilities than Gerald and his virtual Bic pen. I’m so grateful to Miss Percy for recommending the competition (and for all the amazing STEM at Habs) and to the people at VEX, for the curiosity and creativity that they inspired in me… and for the robot arm they sent me!
