Best Female Robot Wars Role Model 2016 Finalist

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Engineering and Technology HQ in London to receive an award for the Best Female Robot Wars Role Model 2016, I was thrilled to have been nominated and to have come second, first prize went to Dominique Andreson from the Sweeney Todd team who is an actual mechanical engineer. Third prize went to Esme from team Sabretooth who also does weapons on her teams robot like I do. Young April from team Glitter Bomb got a special award as well, the award was sponsored by the IET, Responsible Robotics and Mentorn TV the people who make Robot Wars and was presented to us all by Robot Wars judge Noel Sharkey.

It was an absolutely amazing experience and opportunity to get to listen to the talks by Jerry Chow from IBM on 'The Future of Supercomputers', Prof. Noel Sharkey 'Engaging with Machines of the Future' and Maneesh Juneja 'Immersive Health. Are We Ready?' was very illuminating and thought provoking, Maneesh's talk in particular made me look at the applications of the new VR tech in a whole new light and consider possibilities and consequences of the tech I hadn't considered before!

The day made me feel a little proud of myself as well, because some of the things that were included in the talks like the Colossus computer and Unimate have been included in my history of robots weekly presentations for the Young Roboteers, it made me feel like I was doing something right, which is a great feeling.

I wish I could have stayed for the rest of the afternoons talks, but I couldn't be in two places at once and I really wanted to go and investigate the rest of the festival and I'm so pleased I did, I wanted to see what the kids were doing with a view to plugging some of the ideas into the programme for the Young Roboteers Club at Derby Silk Mill.

The experience has now made me very keen to attend Big Bang in Birmingham next March, I was told by one of the children doing our current YR course that I'd love it and should go and after some research I see he wasn't wrong. I would love to go along and see the latest technology in action and help encourage kids to get more involved in STEM, so if anybody fancies inviting me do get in touch!

There was some really exciting things happening in the exhibition room, 3D printing demos, although the chaps didn't seem that interested in talking to me, maybe they thought a woman wouldn't be interested? I got some super info from the Women in Engineering stand, and I got to meet the Head of Operations at VEX Robotics and discuss some exciting opportunities for the Young Roboteers of the future at Derby Silk Mill.

I have to say that watching the children using the VEX Robotics kits was amazing, I was particularly impressed by the all girl team busily creating a robot using the VEX EDR kits, they were amazing! Building, coding and pushing the kit to its extremes, the confidence that emanated from them was terrific to witness, we need to see more of this happening in the future.

One of the parents in the Home Ed - Robot Resource Group that I've set up on Facebook recently, told me about the VEX kits. I went off to investigate and I fell in love with IKE (centre robot in the photo above) he's one of the robots you can build with a VEX kit, he reminds me of one of my favourite fictional 80's robots Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. So I was really pleased to see VEX at the IET Festival, I picked up some useful information and I now want to play with the kits myself, watch this space :)

There was another display that caught my attention, the EPCC, based at Edinburgh University were encouraging you to build your own Supercomputer and to this end were demonstrating Wee Archie a Supercomputer constructed using 18 Raspberry Pi 2’s, a network switch, a power supply unit (PSU) and Ethernet cables. "Each Pi can calculate 93 million (that’s 93,000,000) instructions per second. Theoretically Wee ARCHIE can therefore do 1,674,000,000 instructions per second if all of the Pi’s are used together at the same time!"

Toni Collis from EPCC explained the Archer project to me and told me about their plans to introduce Wee Archlet, which uses an even smaller Raspberry Pi cluster - I think she said 8 - and is designed to be cheap and easy to build whilst still demonstrating the key concepts of parallel computing. The project will include resources for schools and home educator clubs to download to help them build and configure a parallel computing system of their own. Archer, Archie's bigger brother can be used to forecast the weather, model turbulent airflow over vehicles (they used an aircraft wing in the demo) and even for simulating how dinosaurs walked. All pretty impressive and me and Simon can't wait to be able to build a Wee Archlet of our own :) You can find out more about what a Supercomputer is and what they can do if you're not familiar with them via the EPCC Resources Page that they have set up on their website.