In years past, we trained mad scientists by building sharks with lasers, conquered Earth, and blasted our rover chassis straight to Mars! But recent excavations on the Red Planet uncovered subterranean ice caverns and ancient dungeon vaults packed with mysterious Martian crystals. These crystals instantly refract, scatter, and neutralize our visible laser beams, rendering our old weapons completely useless.

Your mission: construct a Bluetooth-controlled, armored shark rover using a Raspberry Pi Pico, DC motors, custom 3D-printed armor, and Python code to explore these crystal depths and survive what lurks inside.

To overcome this dungeon hazard, mad science had to evolve. We swapped our lasers for invisible modulated infrared emitters. Even better, this new tactical IR system allows us to encode real data packets directly into our attack pulses! Attacks are no longer just light beams; they deliver custom damage payloads, player IDs, and status effects, opening up a whole new world of software abilities. Pair that with rear-mounted IR receivers, real-time piezo audio buzzers, and programmable state machines for health, shields, and sound effects, and your rover becomes a fully customizable tabletop-style combat vehicle.

A ticket for this Pre-compiler will entitle you to a kit that includes a Raspberry Pi Pico and the hardware to build a rover that will be yours to keep. You may also bring a lab assistant to help with the assembly and programming (one kit per ticket though!). Accomplished mad scientists will be in the lab to guide you through the build process. We will also have stretch goals and challenges for those with previous experience or fast learners. So, roll for stats, grab your gear, and ready your party and come join us for this out-of-this-world fun and learning for all levels!

We had a lot of positive feedback on this session in the past... selling out most times we've done it. We've made yet more improvements to the build process to simplify the assembly and with the addition of some new hardware that allow the sharks to communicate via IR, we've blown open the possibilities of customizations that attendees can add. We have base classes and tutorials on how they can extend the functionality and make their own exciting game modes.

Battle Arena Proposal: If feasible, we'd like to secure a dedicated space/time slot outside of our pre-compiler hours (such as later that evening or during open lab times) where attendees can bring their completed rovers to participate in a free-for-all tournament to test out their new creations with others. Our super duper lab assistants would be there to help facilitate the "battles" and provide after hours technical help.

Returning Attendees / Upgrades: We plan to bring extra modular upgrade parts so returning participants from previous years can bring their older rovers and retrofit them with the new IR combat brackets and piezo buzzers. We will announce this in Discord ahead of time.

Education Focus: For the extremely eager, our pre-reqs, not only include the required software(which is minimal), but also descriptions and labs for the individual electronics components that go into the build. While this level of understanding is not required to be able to build the working rover during the pre-compiler it is there if attendees want a deeper understanding and/or use this session as a springboard to start their own STEM or robotics club.

Room Setup: Typically would like room for 100 (50 tickets and 1 helper per ticket holder). Standard workshop power access for participant laptops. Would be nice to have an extra table or two to put kits and parts on.