On Saturday, October 20th, the Tokyo tournament for MakeX Japan robot competition was held at Setagaya Monodzukuri School. As the first MakeX Competition hosted in Japan, it was organized under the cooperation of Azhai Communications, J-Robo Co. Ltd., and the Japan STEM Education Association. Participants competed in order to advance to the MakeX World Championship, to be held in Guangzhou, China from December 7th-9th.
24 primary school level participants were divided into 12 paired teams, with 8 of those teams advancing to the final. Over the course of the game, teams had to continually improve their own mBot by modifying programs on mBlock, the visual programming software provided by Makeblock.
One of the features of MakeX is that teams need to cooperate with each other in order to solve tasks, forming alliances to meet a common goal while ultimately competing against each other. MakeX supports children to develop their skills through cooperation, shared struggle, and the joy of group success.
In Japan, primary schools are taking progressive steps towards teaching programming in the classroom. Classes are incorporating tablets and robots, with overall compulsory programming education to be instituted by 2020.
After the exciting battles at the Tokyo competition, the Alliance team of “Team UK” and “Team Yui & Kokoro” won the championship.
Team UK, the MVP of the Tokyo tournament, was selected to participate in the MakeX World Championship to be held in Guangzhou China from December 7th-9th. Competing there will be the passionate winning team from each competition in Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Okinawa, to join the MakeX World Championship.
If you want to support some of the passionate teams from the Tokyo competition, you can support their crowdfunding campaign here: https://camp-fire.jp/projects/view/108098
Watch video of the Tokyo competition here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8Djk6acMw&feature=youtu.be