6.x70 — Pick your poison
CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE: A previous version of this story mistakenly indicated that 6.270 has only existed for “over a decade” — rather, 6.270 is in its 26th year, having started in 1987.
6.x70 — Pick your poison
Have you ever wanted to design a website, battle robots, or see who can write the smartest code? MIT students engaged in these activities through several competitions during IAP, most notably 6.270, 6.370, and 6.470. Last week, the winners to these student-run competitions were announced.
Since 1987, 6.270, the Autonomous Robot Design Competition, has given students the opportunity to design and build a robot using Legos by the end of IAP. According to the course description, the class aims to teach topics on robotic design including software and hardware. John F. William ’16, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz ’16, and Jacob F. Tims ’16 of Team 10, Legolas, placed first.
“I’m so full of adrenaline I can’t think straight, but again, I just wanted to thank everybody, the organizers, and the sponsors,” Tims said at the end of the competition. Coming in second was Team 24, Yo Yak. Team 22, No Prescription, of Theta Xi, came in third place and Team 13 placed fourth.
While 6.270 requires software and hardware skills, 6.370, the Battlecode competition, focuses more on the coding aspect. In the competition, two teams of autonomous robots attack each other. Each robot is loaded with a player’s program and must autonomously work with other robots on its team to accomplish its goals. Students need to implement artificial intelligence, pathfinding, and distributed algorithms. Battlecode held four tournaments during IAP. The top eight teams advanced to the finals, which were streamed live on Feb. 2. According to the Battlecode website, Teh Nubs took first place, followed by Not Very Good At Battlecode, and GrumpyCat.
Rounding out the 6.x70 class series, the Web Programming Competition, 6.470, teaches students how to build database-backed websites from scratch. The competition draws on more than just programming intellect, requiring students to think also about user interface and design. This year, there were two divisions to the competition, the “Main” Division and the “Rookie” Division. Team Members Alexander J. Lin ’15, Felix Sung ’14, and Kimberly L. Toy ’15 took home first place in the Main Division with their website Jellify. Jellify allows users to associate certain photos with events marked on a map and to share and collaborate on those maps through social networking. Taking second place were team members Sean P. Karson ’14 and Cosmos Darwin ’15. They created Set-up, which matches students with people who they would work well with on psets and studying. Connor R. Kirschbaum ’13 (a Tech contributing editor), who built Happenline, which allows users to annotate maps with photos, came in third. Atlas, developed by Jorge Jay-Jay Amaya G and Alexander M. Dixon G, took fourth. Atlas allows users to save pages about cities around the world; each page aggregates tweets and helpful information like weather. In the Rookie Division, team members Shantanu Jain ’16, Andrei Ivanov ’16, and Dumitru Savva won with Test#Code, a website geared towards teachers who want programming problems for students to do online.
The IAP coding competitions challenged students in all aspects of hardware, software, and website design.
—Anthony Yu