A Fun Day at iCode

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Today, I went to iCode. I got to participate in Battle of the Bots and play Survival Minecraft.

When I arrived, it was lunchtime. I didn’t want to join the first half of the class. By then, everyone had finished lunch, so we played Minecraft.

After lunch, it was time to start the program. I had signed up for Minecraft, but there weren’t enough people, so my class was combined with the Battle of the Bots robotics program.

First, we got our robot and learned how to pair it with a computer. We also learned how to connect other devices to the robot. Then it was time to code it.

The teacher explained that using “if” blocks was important, but Ryan and Oliver weren’t interested in using them. The teacher said their robot was probably going to fail.

My code was more complex than theirs. It used one big forever loop with instructions to:

• Turn if it didn’t detect a target.
• Move forward if it detected a target.
• Back up if its color sensor detected white, which was the tape marking the boundary.

This was a sumo-wrestling event. Our coded robots had to push their opponents until all four of the opponents’ wheels were outside the boundary to win.

After the competition, we played a drawing game. We had to draw something for the others to guess. I did especially well in two rounds:

1. The apple tree: I drew an apple tree, and it was so obvious that everyone guessed it immediately. I earned 40 points.
2. The atom: The teacher drew this one. At first, we guessed all sorts of things, like a flower. When he added rings, we thought it might be a planet. But after he drew the electrons and protons, I realized it was an atom. I was the first to guess, so I earned 50 points. That won me the final game: one atom, worth 50 points.

Then it was time to use the controller for the Super WrestleLink event, but the other players were already out, so we couldn’t play. We played Minecraft for another six or seven minutes. I mined a lot of cobblestone, at least two stacks, hunted pigs and chickens for meat, and broke both my wooden pickaxe and my stone pickaxe.

Finally, after everyone had packed up, we got to do the sumo-wrestling event. I didn’t do very well in the best-of-three competition. I managed to win only one match against Ryan and Oliver.

After Oliver left, Ryan and I cleaned everything up so we could play Minecraft, but I couldn’t join because my dad picked me up early.

In conclusion, iCode was a new place for me, and I never knew it could be so much fun!