On 21 February 2021, the annual open robotic tournament CyberDubna was held online for the first time. 11 teams were pre-registered but in the end, only 10 of them were able to participate: the insidious COVID-19 made its own adjustments even to this event… In total, 22 schoolchildren took part in the tournament.

The teams were divided into two age groups that worked in parallel on the same task. There were “6-8 grade” and “9-11 grade” nominations. This year, the geography of participants was limited only to the Moscow region, and as usual, the Dmitrov district prevailed (in fact, it was there that the idea of the tournament was born). There were also participants from Dubna, and Pushkin and Serpukhov districts.

Yet another tradition maintained was the format of the competition task “robot for life”. The task was to create a code providing remote operation of a system (receiver-transmitter) used for encrypted messaging. The Arduino platform was used for programming. Organizers assembled the devices and placed them in the “Command Post” in the JINR Public Library named after D. I. Blokhintsev in Dubna.

Organizers and participants interacted via a Discord server. The connection to the device was made through the remote desktop programme AnyDesk.

The tasks had three stages: control of the transmitter, contol of the receiver, and the creation of a message decryption system. Each stage had two difficulty levels. All teams succeeded with the first stage. More than half of them managed to overcome the next one. The winners passed all three stages but with various degrees of completeness. Thus, the senior winner is the team from the Center for continuing education of schoolchildren “PRIMER” led by Evgeny Netemin from School No. 9 of Dubna (supervised by P. L. Luchinin). The team scored 36 points out of 39. The junior winner was the team from Lyceum No.2 from Protvino represented by Oleg Kruchinin, Anton Rychkin, and Egor Shirokov (21 points out of 39, supervised by M. V. Savchenkova).

Of course, there were some difficulties and force-majeure circumstances caused by the remote format (for example, the internet disconnection at the “Command Post”). Fortunately, organizers managed to successfully overcome all the troubles and complete the tournament. A short video report from the tournament is available via the link.

Yu. Zelenkov, V. Kuzmin, S. Sergeev, P. Shirkov;
photos and video by A. Yudin