Meta Robot Racing Teambuilding
A Meta Robot Racing Teambuilding event included thrilling racing, combined with innovative design, collaboration, and teamwork!
Meta hosted us at the MPK 21 building in the Pony Express outdoor venue. It was an excellent venue for 60-80 people as we were able to rearrange the room into 9 team tables, 1 staff table, and we still had a few more tables available. 6 of the teams shared two long, large, wooden, rectangle tables that are part of the venue, and three teams put taller, smaller tables together to form a larger table.
The race track was full sized at 20′ x 30′ and rested nicely on the concrete flooring, which also made for an excellent racing surface. The covered outdoor venue was perfect for a fall event, and I imagine would be great year round. Also the noise from cheering and yelling racing fans dissipated throughout the endless and expansive outdoor area.
The teams are given 1-hour to design, build, trade for parts, modify, test and modify again before racing. As you can see from the pictures, each racer was unique and all racers completed the required laps successfully. We had several winners of different race formats.
We started with a “collaborative” format where drivers passed the remote like a baton each 1/4 of the track, so four drivers drove 1-lap around the track. Exciting and aerobic were words to describe this format. Our next race was 1-driver, 1-lap; which was more efficient and offered a quick and reliable winning team. The third format was 4-laps, 4-drivers, which was the most popular format. This gave every team time to enact the strategy they had planned for their Robot Racer. Lasting about 10 minutes, it featured numerous lead changes, and some unpredictable events.
Our “Race Finale” determined our co-champions (pictured above). We gave the teams 10-minutes to fix and modify their Robot Racers for the final race while we changed the track from an oval to a figure-8 “Max Destruction” track! We asked the group their preferred format and they chose the 4-lap, 4-driver format for the finale.
Our winning teams each completed four laps successfully ahead of the other teams, and close enough to where there was some debate about our champion. I decided to anoint co-champions and everyone was happy!
Congratulations to our winning teams. A special builders note to Team-1 (pictured top, right) as they were the only team to modify the racer before ever completing the basic model. A huge risk/reward decision that ultimately helped them to a championship!
A huge thank you to Meta for inviting us to campus for an awesome event with with amazing robot builders and racers!
