Subject:
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Re: BrickHeap Wars!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Sat, 9 Feb 2002 04:50:33 GMT
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Original-From:
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Steve Baker <{sjbaker1@airmail.net}AntiSpam{}>
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Reply-To:
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sjbaker1@airmail.net/StopSpam/
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Viewed:
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939 times
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Matthew Gerber wrote:
> David and I are going to work on developing and fleshing out the BrickHeap
> Wars format during and after BricksWest. We're really going to
> learn-by-doing, and see what sorts of things work best (and don't).
We did something like this at my son's birthday party...but with 11yr olds and
on a MUCH smaller scale! (We even called it "BrickYard Wars")
* We gave each kid one Mindstorms motor, one wire and a 9v battery pack with
brand new Duracells in it.
* They had access to my entire Lego collection - minus anything electrical
in nature.
* There was an 'anti-hogging' rule that said that nobody could take more than
1/4th of the available parts in any one of my 100+ storage drawers. I'd
decided not to enforce the rule unless it looked like the hogging was
causing problems for the other teams...but in the end the kids were very
good about it.
* Every part they took from the drawers either had to be used in their
machine - or replaced in the correct drawer before the time limit
was up (a defensive measure on my behalf to avoid having ten trillion
Lego parts to put away at the end of the day!).
They only had 15 minutes to build their machine for each contest.
The contests were:
* A straight race over 10 feet - fastest machine wins.
* A 'Tractor Pull' (remember the first episode of Scrapheap/Junkyard-wars?),
the two machines were connected with a strong elastic band - each sitting
on top of a thick book - the two books placed 6" apart. First one to
topple into the gap loses.
* Hill climb. I had one of those large grey base-plates inclined on a slope.
They each had to drive to the top of the hill - any who failed were eliminated.
Once everyone has run once, make the hill a little steeper - repeat until
only one machine left!
* Going in a straight line: where they had to see how far their machine
could go down a 4" wide white line without going off the edge.
I'd planned to do a "crane that can lift the heaviest weight" round and a
"machine that can throw a minifig the furthest" - but we ran out of time...
and attention-span!
It was a blast! We had something like 10 kids playing in each of the rounds
and some suprisingly creative solutions.
> I imagine that we'll end up putting up a page of rules like other games use
> (BrickWars, Pirate Game) so anyone, anytime, anywhere can use our framework
> to play their own games or develop their own challenges.
Hmmm - good idea...But *PLEASE* allow people to use NQC as well as the Lego
graphical programming system. Those of us who run Linux can't practice with
the Lego graphical programming thingy - so forcing everyone to use that
wouldn't be fair.
Also, the "Scavanging in the scrapheap" part of the original TV series needs
to be emulated. You could dump a stash of rare-but-useful parts like turntables,
pneumatics, weight elements, micromotors, etc into several HUGE buckets of Bionicles,
RoboRiders and JarJarBinks minifigs and make the players go and rummage
in them for things you don't provide them in their basic sets!
I can't wait to see the teams heroically *pushing* their terminally broken
Lego machines to the finish line, spewing hydraulic fluid in all directions and
bailing out water as they go...or something like that! :-)
Good luck!
----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
Mail : <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkMail: <sjbaker@link.com>
URLs : http://www.sjbaker.org
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: BrickHeap Wars!
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| (...) I can't wait!! How many more sleeps to BrickHeap Wars! I think the 3 hour rule is a good idea it gives you too much time to think so you start improving your robot and with my experience it makes them worse. And then there isn't enough time to (...) (22 years ago, 9-Feb-02, to lugnet.robotics)
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