Curiosity Open

Great Lakes Science Center will once again host the Curiosity Open: Robotics Challenge! The Curiosity Open is an annual, off-season, robotics tournament that features some of the best high school robotics teams from across the region.

This past season, FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC) teams from across the city, and from the Great Lakes region, successfully competed at major events throughout the U.S. and internationally at the FIRST® World Championship! On Saturday, September 28, the Science Center will welcome up to 24 FRC teams and their fans to this exciting, off-season invitational event. The floor of the Science Center's special exhibition hall will be transformed into a robot battleground where teams of students, working in three-team alliances, will go head-to-head, tournament style, to see whose robots are the best designed and constructed!

Team Registration

Special Note: Once 24 robots have been registered for this event, additional teams trying to register robots will be waitlisted.

Registration fee: $250 per team for the first robot. ($125 for each additional robot)

(Competitors needing to provide payment using a purchase order or check must call 216-621-2400 to register.)

Tentative Event Schedule

GAME ANIMATION
CRESCENDO^SM presented by Haas, is the music-themed game that robots will play at this year’s Curiosity Open. Participating teams must use innovative engineering, creative thinking, and teamwork to succeed. To learn more about this season’s game, watch the game animation below or read the Game Overview.

GAME OVERVIEW
In CRESCENDO^SM presented by Haas, two competing alliances are invited to score notes, amplify their speaker, harmonize on stage, and take the spotlight before time runs out. Alliances earn additional rewards for meeting specific scoring thresholds and for cooperating with their opponents.

During the first 15 seconds of the match, robots are autonomous. Without guidance from their drivers, robots leave their starting zone, score notes in their speaker or amp, and collect and score additional notes.

During the remaining two minutes and 15 seconds, drivers control their robots. Robots collect notes from human players at their source and score them in their amp and speaker. Each time an alliance gets two notes in their amp, the human player can amplify their speaker for 10 seconds. Notes scored in an amplified speaker are worth more points than those scored in an unamplified speaker.

A human player may choose to repurpose a note scored in their amp in cooperation with their opponent. If each alliance repurposes a note by hitting their Cooperation button in the first 45 seconds of Teleopperiod, all teams in the match receive a Cooperation point (which influences their rank in the tournament), and the number of notes needed for the melody bonus is reduced.

As time runs out, robots race to get on stage and deliver notes to their traps. Harmonizing robots, i.e. robots sharing a chain, earn an added bonus. Robots earn even more points if a human player spotlights robots on a chain by scoring a note on the chain’s microphone.

The alliance that earns the most points wins the match!

ABOUT FIRST
The FIRST® Robotics Competition is an exciting, international competition that challenges teams, professionals, and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way that is unlike any other event. No yearly challenge is the same!

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded in 1989 by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire an appreciation of science and technology in young people. Based in Manchester, N.H., FIRST® designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills while motivating students to pursue future STEM careers. FIRST® provides the FIRST® Robotics Competition for high school students, FIRST® Tech Challenge for grades 7-12, and FIRST® LEGO League, which is subdivided into three separate divisions for Pre-K through grade 8.