Menlo Park Robot Racing
A Menlo Park Robot Racing team building event at Meta’s MPK Vanilla Room was a huge success. The room could have easily housed up to 14 teams in a large horseshoe configuration or up to 20 teams by spacing the tables throughout, while leaving room for the track. It also offered wonderful natural lighting through huge South facing windows.
8 teams of 5 people each had 1-hour to design, build, test, and complete a custom robot racer. Teams traded parts with each other, and two teams managed to complete 1 of the 4 possible “trade-up” packages which allowed them to trade-up for Monster wheels! As you can see from the image above, each racer had a distinctive and unique design.
Teams are rewarded for making heavier robots with a better starting position. This matters in robot racing because the full contact nature of the racing makes it hard to get through from the rear positions. Our heaviest robot who won pole position, also traded-up for the big wheels, which can be a tough task considering they had to trade quite a few parts to get the wheels.
Our two winning teams are pictured above. Each team won a 5-lap race where we traded the remote like a baton after each lap. Each person on the team got to drive 1 complete lap. Both teams had clever designs and deserved to win. We also felt like the races would have been better had we been able to enforce the race boundary. In our never ending quest for the perfect event we turn our attention to this detail!
Robot Racing is very appealing to groups that have a mixed audience of multiple roles within the company, have sales folks, or groups that prefer more cross-team interaction. The trading of parts along with the incentive of “trading-up” creates a totally different element to this event. The entire event floor is buzzing with inter-team negotiations!
A huge thank you to Meta for trusting us again with your talented folks and inviting us to he MPK campus! This marked our 50th event at Meta campus!
