B.C. students show off programming skills in 2016 RoboCup Junior Games

Cheers and jeers erupt as a softball-sized, wheeled robot pushes an electronic ball into a mini soccer net.

The robot soccer challenge was one of three events in the Western Canada RoboCup Junior Games, held in Kelowna, B.C., Wednesday.

There are no remote controls guiding the mechanical athletes toward the ball.

These robots are autonomous, meaning all their ball-tracking and kicking skills are the result of months of programming work done by student developers.

Sawyer Kemp beat his opponent by a score of 3 to 2.

"I think it was a pretty even match," he said.

"It was probably the most fun match of the day."

The Grade 7 student from Winfield, B.C., spent months building his robot and then programming movements into it.

"It was a lot of building and repairing and building and repairing," he said.

"At first I was pretty confused, but it worked itself out."

The other events in the RoboCup Junior Games were the rescue challenge and the dance challenge.

A robot participating in the rescue challenge had to use colour sensors to guide itself along a course and up ramps in a race against time to rescue a victim in an artificial disaster scenario.

The competitors, from elementary, middle and secondary schools across western Canada, are learning valuable programming skills, said Nadir Ould-Khessal, chair of the Western Canada RoboCup Junior Games organizing committee.

"Basically it's engineering. Programming and coding is a major thing and that's what these students are doing," he said.

"There's also electronic design. They are working with micro-controllers and the stuff that we see in our cell phones."

The final event mixed artistic creativity with robotics.

Students created a dance routine and performed it along with a robot programmed to follow the rhythm of the music.

Teaching a robot to dance is a fun way to learn about programming and coding, said Grade 6 student Lauren Hoffman.

"Well it's not very hard," she said.

"We just kind of move these boxes around on a screen and it does what we want it to do."

The winners qualified for the 2017 World RoboCup Junior Games in Japan.