Last week, at the end of the 2017-18 school year, the Catania school community celebrated the accomplishment of the robotics team from IIS Archimede, the result of years of hard work and passion by Professor Domenico Ardito, the students, their families and the entire school directed by Agatino Barbagallo. Indeed, the school has been investing resources to promote educational robotics for years.
During the course of the school year, the school achieved two successes: a European award for Team Sonny and a global award for Team Papaoutai in the Rescue Simulation Superteam Category.
At the European Championship in Montepulciano (Pescara), two students from class 4A at the Archimede School, Daniele Naccarato (Automation Curriculum) and Ludovico Papale (Electro-technics) defeated a strong Croatian team in the semi-finals and a German team in the final, making the school the European Champion. In the meantime, Team Papaoutai was training for the World Robotics Championship in the Rescue Simulation Super-team Category that was held in Montreal (Canada) on June 19-21, 2018, as reported by magazine Live Sicilia.
"In the team world championship with Mexico and Taiwan, Giuseppe Favara (4B Computer Science) and Luca Montagno Bozzone (3B Electronics) managed to develop synergies with the “allied” countries, optimising their algorithms and logic systems. They reached the final and placed second worldwide!”
So, how do these teams work? Professor Domenico Ardito explained it in an interview with daily La Repubblica: “The Rescue Simulation Category connects two planes: the real world with a physical robot that must find and identify victims and bring them to safe zones, avoiding traps, with the virtual world that is activated on a PC server by a Zigbee Signal through a programmed synchronism that allows it to operate under the same conditions.”
See the article (in Italian): Catania, gli studenti dell'istituto Archimede vice campioni mondiali di robot.
