Spent the morning at the Anchorage Robot Rendezvous, where teams from Kasigluk, Newtok and other villages competed with young programmers around the state.
Here's the Newtok Yungaqs performing a dance they made about bicycle safety. (Newtok has no roads, only boardwalks. And those are missing boards.)
What's that got to do with robotics? The competition was also about coming up with ways to improve transportation in your home town.
The team describes the dance:
"The Yup'ik dance is a story; most of the other Yup'ik songs are stories and that's why we chose the Yup'ik song. We have even practiced and shared it with people in our community, some of our elders, we danced it at our assembly, and we even shared with the ASB members. We have had a lot of fun doing it and many of the students in the school now know the dance since they joined us in practices for the fun of it. The Yup'ik dance is like this, we are having fun biking around until we crash without any safety gear on and then we start crying home to our mom and we pick up our bike. Then we go biking again, but this time we are using our safety gear when we crash, get on our bikes again and go have fun."
Meantime, this thing was patrolling the lobby:
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