Raanana and Ostrovsky High School will host the national robotics competition – Roboner 2010, which will be held on the 4th of March at the Municipal Sports Arena.  The event will be dedicated to promoting awareness with regard to people with special needs and to introducing the younger generation to technological innovations.  The competition is being held in Raanana for the second consecutive year, in the spirit of Mayor Nahum’s philosophy of promoting the study of science and robotics.
 
At the competition, organized by the Raanana Municipality and the Ministry of Education and attended by Mayor Nahum Hofree, robotics teams from dozens of Israel high schools will be participating including the Ostrovsky High School robotics team, which will be participating in the competition for the ninth consecutive year.  Ostrovsky won first place at the International Roboner Competition in 2007. Last year, Ostrovsky students won first palce in the KIT category. The winners of the national Roboner Competition will represent Israel in the international competition which is scheduled this April at the Connecticut Trinity College in the U.S. 

For the first time, this year, science students from a school in Um El Fahm, who received supervision and professional assistance by Ostrovsky High school, will participate in the competition.

This year, the competition’s main assignment is building autonomous robots that are capable of locating a plate of food in an apartment building and serving it to a person sitting in a wheelchair, who is not capable of doing so by himself.  Students will also compete in building an independent robot capable of moving through a maze, similar to an apartment, and locating the source of fire and extinguishing it.

The Roboner Competition has been held in Israel for the past 11 years, and organized by the Education Ministry’s Science and Technology Administration.  The competition is supervised and authorized by Trinity College in the U.S. and is a part of the international competition that is held annually in the U.S.  The rules of the Israeli competition are the same as those in the international competition.