Glossary¶

While we try to use terminology which are clear and/or well known, here's a list you can check if you're not sure!

Competition programme:

the overall programme of events and activities which the teams participate in

Competition year:

the 6 months (or so) between Kickstart and the Competition during which teams build their robots; see also SRnnnn

Competition Team:

the group of volunteers responsible for delivering a particular year's Competition programme

Doing:

an event where volunteers work together to progress the tasks of the organisation, such as preparing for the competition or testing the kit; contrast with "meetings" which are typically where discussions happen

GitHub:

a development platform, used to host code repositories and to coordinate tasks

KCH:

a Raspberry Pi HAT designed by Student Robotics that is part of our Brain Board assembly. KCH stands for Kajetan Champlewski HAT in memory of a volunteer.

Kickstart:

the start of the competition year, when we hand out kits to teams

Kit Logistics Issue (KLI):

a ticket tracking the assignment of a kit to a team

Kit Team:

the group of volunteers responsible for maintenance and development of the Team Kits and for supporting competitors in using those kits

Mentor:

a volunteer who helps teams build their robots

PLOD:

an initialism of Pink LED of Death, a bug that is present in the Servo Board that can be identified by a pink / purple light on the board.

Pull Request (PR):

the review stage of some changes on GitHub to code or documentation

Retro:

a meeting after an event to discuss the positives, negatives, feedback, and ways to improve for the following year

RUB:

an initialism of 'Really Useful Box', a brand of storage box. We use these boxes to store our kit.

Slack:

an instant-messaging tool we use for quick discussions

SR:

an abbreviation for 'Student Robotics'

SR(A)WN:

Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly Newsletter; a semi-regular newsletter written by volunteers for volunteers

SRComp:

a software stack which we use to run competition events

srobo:

another abbreviation for 'Student Robotics'

SRnnnn (e.g: SR2019):

this is the canonical way to refer to a given year's competition programme; the year number is the calendar year in which the competition event takes place, so SR2019 was the competition programme which ran from November 2018 until April 2019

Team Kits:

we provide a kit of parts which form the starting point for robots built by the competing teams

Tech Day

during the competition year we organise events at which the teams can come with their robots and get extra help from mentors as well as meet other teams

TLA:

an initialism of 'Three Letter Acronym'. We assign each competing team a TLA.