The second round of the Noosphere Engineering Race is complete, and the jury has named the 11 finalists who will advance in the competition. Noosphere Engineering Race (NER) is the first Ukrainian competition based on the American VEX constructor. NER is another Noosphere’s initiative in the goal to create a favourable ecosystem for the development of engineering startups in Ukraine. “Noosphere Engineering Race unites the youngest engineers in the competition ring with a variety of robots, encouraging creative, scientific, technical and innovative activities,” said Chief Judge Maxim Slodzik.
The second round of the Noosphere Engineering Race was held virtually. 100 participants were tasked with completing assignments in the virtual simulator VEXcode VR. VEXcode VR is an easy-to-use platform for programming a virtual robot. You can use a block-based coding environment powered by Scratch Blocks, or a custom Python text interface.
VEX constructor is new for the Ukrainian robotics community. Noosphere held a series of training webinars to teach about the VEX constructor and its features and differences compared to other constructors, as well as the VEXcode VR virtual simulator and its capabilities. To complete the second-round task, participants had to program virtual robots to solve 3 tasks: reproduce a given picture, remove the most obstacles from the field, and move game tokens to colored zones.
Based on the results, the judges determined 11 finalists:
- Olena Teslia
- Oleksandra Shapovalenko
- Hlib Kyrpa
- Anastasiia Komar
- Kateryna Bundiuk
- Denys Yavorskyi
- Hryhorii Halik
- Denys Poslavskyi
- Kyrylo Blahodarov
- Vitalii Kyrychenko
- Dmytro Ivanchenko
Noosphere awarded each finalist with the VEX IQ constructor kit, with plastic parts specifically designed for little engineers. Participants will use this constructor while battling it out in the third round. After the competition, finalists will keep their kits so they can continue to learn the VEX platform.
Currently, each participant is preparing robots they can control to build a tower of cubes, and will show them off to the judges at the finals on December 16-18. Based on the results, the judges will announce the top 3 winners, who will share a prize pool of $6,000. All finalists will receive certificates and prizes from Noosphere.
Subscribe to the competition’s official Facebook page for all the updates. Soon we will know winners of the first Noosphere Engineering Race.