Squeaky the Robot needs a new, faster CPU

THE WOODLANDS, Texas -- On Saturday, October 12 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., The Woodlands Mall will welcome teams participating in North Houston’s BEST’s 2013 annual robotics competition. For the 2013 competition, called GAMEKEEPER, student teams were challenged to build CPUs that would get Squeaky, BEST’s original robot, the upgrades it needs to become Squeaky 2.0.

On the October 12 Demo Day at The Woodlands Mall, the teams will run their robots over a course to practice for the official game day which will be hosted the following weekend at College Park High School. During this Demo Day at The Woodlands Mall, the teams’ robots will compete in a game where a set of tasks have been defined. The robots may be required to perform a variety of tasks, such as removing “dangerous” materials, rescuing aliens or saving the world. The 2013 Demo Day will be hosted in the court near Nordstrom.

For GAMEKEEPER 2013, student teams from middle and high schools in Montgomery County and North Harris County were required to build CPUs in three stages: building logic gates from transistors, building integrated circuits from logic gates and then CPUs from integrated circuits. The materials needed to build the CPS were provided to each team free of charge.

North Houston BEST, a 501 c(3) organization, is one of the many hubs for Best Robotics Inc., which is an organization dedicated to fostering science and engineering among high school and middle school students throughout the country. Each year, a competition is hosted where students construct a robot from a limited set of materials. The North Houston BEST hub supports schools from the Montgomery County and North Harris County area. For more information about BEST and future competitions, visit www.northhoustonbest.org.