Students make some last-minute tweaks to their designs before the start of the competition. [Photo from WeChat account hefeigaoxinfabu]

Teenagers from Hefei, Anhui province flocked to a local middle school on Nov 24-25 as the East China elimination stage of RoboCupJunior (RCJ), an international robotics competition for youths, kicked off. 

A project-oriented educational initiative for young students up to the age of 19, the event attracted 240 teams of over 850 participants from across the country. 

It also won solid support from the RCJ organizing committee, the Chinese Association of Automation, the administrative committee of the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone, and the University of Science and Technology of China. 

The two days have seen youngsters taking on diversified challenges, each emphasizing cooperative, problem-solving and task-based skills.

Some students display their robot at the competition. [Photo/ahwang.cn]

In the Soccer league, 2-on-2 teams of autonomous mobile robots played games in a highly dynamic environment, tracking a special light-emitting ball in an enclosed field marked in shades of gray. 

The Rescue league engaged robots in identifying victims quickly and accurately within re-created disaster scenarios, varying in complexity from line-following on a flat surface to negotiating paths through obstacles on uneven terrain. 

The robot OnStage league encouraged creativity, bringing one or more robots together with music, dressed in costume and moving in harmony. 

The winning teams took a tour around China Speech Valley and iFlytek after the event, getting first-hand experience of China's cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and voice recognition fields. 

As one of the organizers, the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone has as always placed importance in promoting science and technology education among teenagers. The zone regarded the event as a good platform to inspire the youngsters’ creativity and power the world with promising robotics and AI professionals.

Winning teams pose for a group photo during their tour to the China Speech Valley on Nov 25. [Photo from WeChat account hefeigaoxinfabu]