Rad to the Core! A game like no other before it.

Radiation, nuclear reactors, fuel rods….save the core before a meltdown!

Rad to the Core brought a never before challenge….taking the robots off of the floor, putting them on a rail overhead and asking them to work below the rail. It was a brilliant unique challenge that had not been considered before….at the time, about as close as we could get to “having robots fly”.

This game also introduced the first-ever electronic scoring. Fuel rods contained magnets on their ends. The containers (PVC pipes) where the fuel rods were to be safely stored contained Field Effect Transistors, which acted as a basic on-off switch when the magnets got near. So, the field was designed to be able to detect when fuel rods were placed into the safe container and automatically report the results to the scoring software via a serial bus.

This functionality allowed Rad to the Core to implement a form of real-time scoring, where graphs could be displayed on the big screen showing a simple bar chart of who was leading….in real time! It added a whole new element of excitement to the competition. The complexity of such an endeavor was not realistic to continue in future games; however, the idea spawned new ideas for other methods that could add to the audience excitement.

• (2003) Real-time scoring using humans to monitor the action as it happened during a match and enter scores on-the-fly. Again displaying a graph on the big screen of which team was leading. Scores, of course, were not official until the match ended and referees verified the scores but it certainly gave the audience a better idea of the leader and increased the excitement level. (photo?)
• (2005) Using lamps and switches to detect when an item was scored, giving the participants and audience direct immediate feedback. (photo?)
• (2009) Motion on the field; Electronic field control
• (2010) Electronic field communication (2009, 2010)