What is Т2С?
The Tournament of the two capitals is a new format of educational robotics competitions. T2C includes the following stages: team/personal, full-time/extramural, competition and project stages. At all stages of this contest teams develop their own robots. According to the organizers, T2S is a completely new kind of competition in the field of school robotics. The contest is in this case based not only on the competitions themselves, as in most other such tournaments, but also on team interaction between several different teams and the city team as a whole. The main prize of the Tournament is a challenge cup, which is awarded to the city based on the results of its teams.
St. Petersburg Team, the winners of the first T2C
According to the T2C rules, the final part of the Tournament is held alternately in each of the capitals - in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The winners of the qualification stages met in mid-May in Moscow for the first time. And in December, the Northern Capital will be the host of the tournament. The strongest school teams in robotics will gather here. By the way, in spring the St. Petersburg team won the tournament’s challenge cup. So the main suspense of this competition is whether the Muscovites will win the award this time or the main prize will remain on the banks of the Neva river.
Who can be part of this competition?
This is a team competition. The team can consist of no more than two school students, a coach and, if necessary, a coach’s assistant. They will assemble and program a robot. Schoolchildren from Moscow and St. Petersburg (including Moscow and Leningrad regions) can be a part of this competition, as well. They shall be grades 5 to 11 students and be of 10 to 18 years of age. The finals of T2C will be held from 14 to 17 December at ITMO University in St. Petersburg. Before the finals, all teams have gone through the regional selection in each of the cities. Teams from other Russian cities will also appear in the finals, but non-competitively.
Qualification phase - November 26.
40 teams, which have successfully passed the selection in their respective cities (up to 20 teams from each capital) can get to the T2C finals. There will be a training day for the teams, on November 19 and 25 in Physics and Mathematics Lyceum № 30 (address: 7th line of Vasilievsky Island, 52). The qualifying round of the competition will be held at the same location on November 26.
Qualification round will be also held in Moscow on November 26. The organizers of this round are the Center for Pedagogical Excellence of the Department of Education of Moscow.
Competition procedure has five main parts.
T2S consists of five competitions. They, in turn, are divided into two groups by age. Schoolchildren of 10 to 14 years of age are offered to solve the tasks "King of the Hill" and "Bridges". In the first of the two, the robots must capture the top of the improvised "mountain" and not allow their competitors to get there. Task "Bridges" requires the well-coordinated work of two robots: a robot-engineer shall build bridges across ditches (rivers), and the second robot shall cross the rivers via the newly-built bridges.
The older children - from 14 to 18 years of age - will compete in the tasks "Race" and "Swings". And if the rules of the "Race" are clear to everyone, then "Swings" requires some explanation and better understanding of its rules. During this task, robots need to collect as many objects of different weight as possible and place them on their scales. The difficulty lies in the fact that access to the desired objects is difficult.
You can read in detail about all four competitions on the T2C website (available in Russian). As the organizers suggest, teams can either design a robot whose sole purpose will be to handle one of the two tasks in their age group, or participate in both competitions at once. 14-year-olds can participate in all four competitions, since they belong to both age groups. The organizers also do not object if younger participants have a go at the two senior categories.
The final competition "The Fifth Element" will be kept secret until the finals start in St. Petersburg. This task will test the participants' ability to reconfigure their robots in accordance with a new task in a limited time.
T2C prizes and gifts.
T2S is designed to pursue several objectives at once: promote teamwork, popularize science and technology, prompt schoolchildren’s and their mentors’ sci-tech creativity and, of course, find the most talented school teams in robotics.
The winners of T2C will receive iPads and segways. Coaches of school teams will receive special diplomas and certificates.
And the main prize, of course, will be the challenge cup of T2S, which changes hands (and sometimes cities), according to each year’s tournament’s outcome.
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