Who it's for
Intermediate for both high school and college, and the best fit for a classroom where students work in groups rather than as individual competitors.
HS intermediateCollege intermediateCooperative4 students · 1 team
Venture Bot Relay Obstacle Course
Four robots. One baton. Agree on the hand-off.
Four students each take one leg of an obstacle course, gates, ramps, moving barriers, and each writes the instructions for their own robot. The team must agree on how the baton passes from one robot to the next. Teams race the clock and each other. This is the one arena where the lesson is cooperation between students, as much as between robots.
What students learn
Working with someone else's code, in public.
The hand-off only works if both students agree on what "ready" means. Get it wrong and the baton drops, in front of everyone. It's a lesson about agreeing on an interface, and it lands harder through a race than through a lecture.
- Agreeing on an interface. Two people's work has to meet in the hand-off zone, and both have to mean the same thing by "go".
- Specializing. The ramp leg and the moving-barrier leg reward different approaches, so each student becomes the expert on their part.
- Timing and synchronization between programs written by different people.
- Debugging someone else's assumptions, which is most of professional software work.
How a run plays
Each leg is a different stretch of course. A robot has to pass every gate in order, get through its obstacles, and reach the hand-off zone, where the baton passes only when both robots are in the zone and the outgoing one signals it's ready. Moving barriers follow a fixed pattern, so a robot that plans beats one that reacts. Fastest team through all four legs wins.
Optional rules
Educators decide whether a dropped baton sends the leg back to the start, how big the hand-off zone is, and how strict the time limit is.
The Venture Bot process in this arena
Decide. Pitch. Compete. Reflect.
In the relay, the role plan is the architecture. Here's how the four beats look for a team of four.
Decide
The role plan is the whole architecture: who takes which leg, who owns the hand-off agreement, and what happens if one student's leg isn't working an hour before the deadline. The team writes down what "ready" means before anyone starts building.
Pitch
Judges score team organization in every arena. In the relay it's the main event. A team that stands up and explains its hand-off agreement, why "ready" means what it means and how they tested it together, has given the clearest possible answer.
Compete
Teams race the clock and each other through the full course. Every run produces a time, or a place where it stopped, so every team has something concrete to talk about.
Reflect
Replays make the hand-offs visible. A dropped baton is never ambiguous: the team can see which robot arrived first, which one waited, and where the agreement broke down.
The venture angle
The role plan isn't a formality here. It's the product.
Every Venture Bot team is judged on team organization and roles. In the relay, that decision determines whether the baton ever gets around the course. Who takes which leg, who owns the hand-off, and how the team handles one member falling behind: these are the questions the judges score, and in this arena the race answers them too.
Where it sits
Built for classrooms that work in groups.
The relay is the arena we recommend to a teacher whose class already works in project groups and who wants the competition to reward that.
Run the Relay
Built for classrooms that work in groups.
If cooperation between students is the lesson you want, tell us about your class and we'll help you get started.