Author: Yoni

This past weekend at RoboCup 2023, our Singapore students really impressed us with their perseverance and effort. We coached CCAs at Cedar Secondary, Pei Hwa Secondary, ZhengHua Primary and Clementi Town Primary schools. Roughly 100 students – about a fifth of the competition total!

Out of Six leagues they competed in, our students took home First Place trophies in all but one. In two categories, our schools won all the trophies…

Rescue Line Entry, U12 – Gold & Silver

OnStage U19, Gold & Silver

CoSpace Rescue, U12 – Gold & Bronze

CoSpace Rescue FS, U12 – Gold, Silver & Bronze

CoSpace Rescue, U19 – Bronze (& 4th place)

CoSpace Rescue FS, U19 – Gold, Silver & Bronze

We salute their work and commitment, and their sportsmanship.

We like supporting RoboCup as it feels the least commercialized of all the competitions in Singapore, with little to no reliance on any particular vendor or hardware, a licensed but free software created in partnership by Singapore Polytechnic.

A big thank you to Dr. Changjiu Zhou for supporting RoboCup in Singapore, Asia Pacific and globally for all these years!

First of all, crazy how long since we last put anything up here.

I guess we’ve been busy!

If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look at the GearsBot platform that Cort has created in the past couple of years.

It’s been a labor of love – an completely open-source and free top-of-the-line realistic, robotics simulator. It has block-based programming, Python, and is compatible with EV3 APIs, so can be used in conjunction with LEGO robotics education. It had helped us, and countless others like us, keep going during the pandemic video-conferencing days and the ensuing transformation in online education.

As of late, Cort has been doing is utmost to keep the Missions category of the simulator up to date with the latest competition models.

For this year’s FIRST LEGO League (FLL), Cort has created an early tutorial video for most of the missions that helps participants visualize the mission models before they can get their hands on it. Subscribe to our channel and be the first to see what comes next:

If you are teaching a beginners robotics course you can start things off with our basic GearsBot curriculum and challenges.

We’ll try to post more about our exciting new educational tools and adventures.

Some splashy fun from last year’s Marine Expedition Holiday Camp – stay tuned for this year’s dates.

As we were looking around for best practice solutions to continue teaching Robotics in the virtual classroom, VEX announced its release of VEXcode VR. Besides being made free for public and educational use, the VEXcode VR platform was designed an equalizer, so that no matter what device you had access to, you could participate in online STEM learning.

This platform just ticked the box for all of the requirements that were suddenly coming fast and furious from schools, who wanted to resume enrichment programs through virtual classrooms:

• Robotics Simulation
• Block Programming + Python API
• Simulated Sensors & Actuators
• Algorithmic Challenges – not just hard-coding paths
• Fun to play with!
• Soft Hardware Requirements – Can be used on iPads or other Tablets
• Enough depth for 1-2 months of lessons (wishful thinking)

There’s an Art Canvas for Turtle programming, a Maze for path creation and algorithmic way-finding, a Castle for a bumper/crasher game, an electromagnet-based game challenge for collecting game elements on the field. Grids that can be used to teach some abstract math concepts, like 2D coordinate systems. It’s quite robust, too!

Is it a perfect platform? No.

Some glaring issues:

• No way to simulate line-following, one of the main use-cases of Robotics competitions in primary and secondary school level events.
• No way for two robots to interact on a single game field concurrently
• No way to design robots
• No moving actuator (only an electromagnet)
• A too-perfect simulation, physics engine-wise
• Limited scope with no obvious pipeline of expansion

Still, we want to thank VEX and Innovation First for their generous and timely release.
If nothing else, it has piqued our interest again in creating our own Robotics Simulation toolkit (TBC).

So far 2020 has been a long parade of kicks in the butt! But, A Posteriori has always possessed a great sense of humor, and while we take the utmost precautions dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and strictly adhere to health regulations, we have also tried to keep up with programs and offerings for our students.

In April, we moved online to conduct part of our Applied Learning Program (ALP) in Electronics, Programming, Design Thinking on the theme of Active Living. We managed to get the students to take physical kits home, and setup virtual classrooms of Discord mainly. Discord, which is free, has a natural “room” or “team” setup, so we could work with multiple design groups separately and almost concurrently – similar to walking around the classroom from desk to desk. Except it wasn’t, and only a half or so of the secondary school students managed to participate actively for the online duration of the program.

Some of the results were really great:

Dance Dance Revolution console for disabled people – large 4-button distributed keyboard that can be used by any combination of whole or damaged limbs. The project used Makey Makey to receive game control input, and an Arduino with PulseSensor to monitor heart-rate.

Several jumping, push-up, or hand exercise virtual games with playful characters responding in real-time. Mostly utilizing ultrasonic and PIR sensors.

A Cyclotron using simple IR reflective sensor with Arduino.

Several lock boxes – for your smartphone – that unlock after some heartrate has been achieved for a specified duration.

We really had fun supporting this cohort of Sec-2 students.

BTW – not this one:
“cher” as in short for teacher:

We opened the doors to our new MakerSpace designed for both kids and adults earlier this year.  It’s located at the MEGA building in Woodlands, Singapore.

Our first intake of students was brought to us by one of our partners, Yap Kwee Lin, who introduced us in the first place, and is an important part of the origin story of A Posteriori.

The kids took us on a Mission to the Moon, as part of their participation in this year’s FIRST LEGO League Jr event.

We enjoyed creating the unique curriculum blending Science (electrolysis of water, solar-powered electronics), Technology (3D printing, indoor planter), Engineering (WeDo Robotics), and Math (lunar orbit mechanics, and various other problems).  We even went on a field trip to observe the night sky at the Galaxy Community Center Observatory.

The kids and their families were super-keen, which made the experience really unique and gratifying.

And, of course, they took great pride in their work and won a trophy for their efforts!

We are hoping to expand our student class of 2019 during the June Holidays.

Our students from Swiss Cottage, Pei Hwa Secondary, and Zhenghua Primary participated in various sub-leagues of the 9th Robocup Singapore Open & Competition this past weekend.

When we teach, there is always a lot of pressure to get the kids on a path to excel.  We are happy to help the kids reach their true potential, as long as they’re having fun.  The Robocup CoSpace Rescue challenge is built like a game, and so the platform lends itself to a fun-filled curriculum with a built-in drive to success (and win the game!).

The kids showed great aptitude in this league, as they clinched first, second, and sometimes even third places (not officially allowed by competition guidelines) in the various fixtures and age groups.  We are looking to establish a more formal partnership with the Robocup league organizers to provide our original curriculum, based on the CoSpace challenge, to more schools in Singapore.  And make the 10th Singapore Open a great success next year.

One pet peeve, our secondary school teams who joined the more competitive RCJ league faced major challenges from Junior Colleges, and so the Under 19 category is going to be quite impossible to surmount – and the coveted spot to represent Singapore internationally quite out of reach…

Kudos to element14 for their work on growing their community of makers and educators.  I happened on their Great micro:bit Education Giveaway publication while looking for out-of-stock micro:bits packages.  I had a compelling story about our work with at-risk youth at Boys’ Town and Muhammadiya Welfare Home, and now we have a bunch of micro:bits we can use to do more good!

We are contacting our non-profit partners to find a good home for the micro:bit Club pack, before the year-end holiday season.

Paying it forward pays back…

Earlier this year our friends at Tinkertanker contacted us with a sort of unsolicited welcome to the Tech Education marketplace.   We really appreciated that professional courtesy.  And we’ve been collaborating with them on several projects ever since, teaching Secondary level courses like Arduino and Python/Processing.

They also referred us to Camp Asia – a leading holiday camp and extracurricular activity provider run by Cognita, the owner of both Australian and Stamford American International Schools.  We built up our relationship with Camp Asia, and now we will be participating more closely with them on their Tech Savvy offerings as their so-called Head Coaches for Creative Coding and Electronic MakerSpace – original curricula curated especially for this collaboration.

Thank you Tinkertanker and Camp Asia for helping us grow and putting your trust in us!