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We Have Moved

It’s hard to believe that we have been at Clayfield for 3 years, when we moved in our place seemed so large and well suited to our needs.

Over these three years, we spent 2 of them with lock downs and social distancing restrictions. Our manufacturing side of the business continues to grow and will need more space to grow into.

We’ve been lucky to find the perfect place to move into, it has a good balance of air conditioned rooms for Junior robotics, with upstairs space for our senior robotics to have a dedicated space that will allow for fields to be permanently setup.

The warehouse side will allow us to do more precision CNC work and broaden our electronics assembly area.

Depending where you come from, Northgate is either a little closer or just a bit further away, but thank you in advance for making the effort to come to us.

We are looking forward to getting back into a new year of robotics and coding … see you all soon.

47 Noble Ave

Northgate, QLD, 4013

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2021 – Term 1 Workshops

This term we are offering a number of workshops for some specialist interest topics:

Minecraft Redstone Creation

Learn how to build some interesting and interactive items with Redstone. Guided by an experienced Minecrafter.

Electronic Circuit Design and Soldering

We will be designing a circuit board that can be used to program tasks with CircuitPython. We’ll design and send away this board to be make. Once it comes back, we’ll solder all of the parts onto the board and program it up.

Minecraft Modding With Java

Building mods with both Forge and server side Spigot, we’ll run through some activities to introduce students to the tools needed to make these types of mods.

Let us know if your interested.

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Robocup – IR Ball Seeker

We have been working on an alternative IR soccer ball sensor for RoboCup Junior teams. Our sensor offers a 360 degree view of the field, meaning teams can use one less sensor to get full coverage. This will help to reduce the cost of sensors that a team needs.

We have two options for teams:

  • EV3 LEGO Technic – Hole pattern that makes it easy to work with LEGO Technic
  • Lightweight – Less mass and I2C headers

Advanced teams can program this sensor using the Arduino framework.

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Covid-19 – Update

The team at Building Block Studio extends best wishes to everyone in the current health crises that the world is experiencing and we hope that everyone is safe and well! It certainly is a scary time filled with much uncertainty. Unfortunately, we can longer run any of our clubs in our studio for the foreseeable future, however, we are now running our coding club online each Saturday morning, from 9am – 10:30am. We hope to have our robotics club online in the near future as well.

Please get in touch with us if your student is interested in joining in, or if you’d like more information. The first lesson is free! We have a great team that can interactively support your students coding journey.

In the meantime, please stay safe and healthy.

From the BBS team

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FIRST LEGO League 2019

We spent the day at the QASMT First LEGO League tournament. Both teams walked away with an invite to the Northern Nationals: on 23/11/2019. EVBees were awarded the Gracious Professionalism Award while BotBuilders achieved Robot Performance and Champions Award. Well done both teams!!

Update:

Congratulations to our BotBuilders FLL robotics team for coming 3rd at the Northern Nationals Championship today, Saturday 23rd November 2019. The team won First Place ‘Mechanical Design Award’ and were invited to attend the international tournament held in July 2020 in Sydney. We can’t wait!

The students worked tirelessly throughout the entire season and always did their absolute best! Well done BotBuilders!

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FIRST Tech Challenge 2019

A very BIG congratulations goes to our BotBuilders FTC robotics team competing at the Australian National Championship on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th December 2019. This was the BotBuilders first year of FTC. A total of 40 teams across Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia qualified to attend the Nationals Championship and we are so proud that our team came 4th due to the outstanding drivers of the robot during each match and the incredible autonomous code used each game! We are also thrilled that they received the Design Award for their robot. Well done BotBuilders

#14380!!!

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CODE CLUB – VIRTUAL REALITY

We have been having a great time this year with our Unity code club, we’ve been exploring first person games that places our player in a 3D world. I had expected that the FPS style would produce the classic shooter style game, but I’ve been very pleasantly surprised to see that our students have tended to focus more on other aspects of the game.

We have a student with a game that involves high speed running with boost and a telekinesis function for moving objects. Another game has the player moving around the scene with the ability to jump into vehicles and drive them around.

Another student has build an amazing low poly city that has waves of zombies tracking the player down. It’s a complete game with ammo counts, huds, weapon switching and beautiful detail.

This term we have been lucky enough to receive a STEM Club grant from Inspiring Queensland. With this grant we have been able to acquire the capability to deliver VR for our coders.

The goal is to be able to have our players navigate the 3D world in VR. A few things that we will need to keep in mind will be:

* How do we move around in a VR world, without making our players feel sick?

– How do different VR platforms track movement?

* How can we play test our worlds in real time while developing them?

* What makes a VR game compelling?

* How do we interact with objects in the VR world?

 

We are looking forward to exploring these topics and I can’t wait to see what our students produce.

We run our code club every Saturday during school term. We have different topics for each age range and skill level:

* Beginners – Scratch and Visual Programming (structured)

* Intermediate – Word problems and text based languages (Python – JavaScript) (structured)

* Other – Unity 3D – this is self driven and can be as deep as the students choose to go. We have structured content for students who need / like that, but we also encourage students to explore and try ideas out.

Contact us to find out more.

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Robocup Jnr – 2018

This year the studio was lucky enough to host 4 teams competing in the Robocup Jnr competition.

We had our wonderful OnStage performers who put together a performance with our Vex IQ robots. They did such a wonderful job with their performance.

The lightweight soccer team narrowly missed out on the finals, which was a great achievement after needing to make some last minute repairs on their attacking robot. The goal keeper ‘Jerry’ saved countless goals, the true robot of the match.

Our young rescue team this year decided to put their Python coding skills to the test and attempt the rescue challenge with Python. The preparation was looking really great, the robot was performing well in the studio. On the day, a few different configurations tripped the robot up in some places especially with some inclines. The team did such an amazing effort to compete, so good to see.

Our senior team undertook two challenges this year, we spent a good part of the year working on the lightweight custom soccer robots. This was a massive undertaking as these robots had custom 3D designed parts, custom circuit boards and sensors. While we had a few issues on Saturday the team made some improvements for Sunday. Better still we came away from the competition with an enormous amount of experience that will help us out next year.

The second challenge the team undertook was the maze challenge. We took this up a few weeks before the state championships, mostly to gain some experience for next year. Again we came away with some skills that we are keen to build on next year.

We are so proud of every team member, it has been such a delight to work with you this year. 
We look forward to next year’s Robocup Jnr event!