RoboCup Junior is an international organisation that oversees various national and international robotics challenges for children aged 7 to 16. National competitions are held each year to select representatives to attend an international competition that is co-located with the international RoboCup conference. In 2003, this will be held in Padua, Italy.
The three main RoboCup Junior challenges are robot football, robot dance and robot rescue.
The robot football challenge is a simplified version of the RoboCup football competition that attracts entries from the leading academic and commercial robotics research laboratories from around the world. The challenge requires children to build and program a small robot capable of playing a simplified form of football. The robots must make use of sensors so that they can identify not only where they are, and their orientation, on the greyscale pitch, but also where the infra-red ball is.
The robot dance challenge is an open challenge in which children must design and build a robot that will dance along to a song of their choosing.
The robot rescue challenge requires a robot to follow a line through a series of small, cluttered rooms and up and down a series of ramps with different inclines, identifying 'casualties' they encounter during their timed exploration of the rescue site.
Whilst these competitions have demonstrated the ability to motivate children to participate in informal activities that relate to design, control and ICT elements of the curriculum, their educational potential has not necessarily been exploited to its full potential.
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