What is Strafing?
A “strafe” maneuver might be familiar to you if you’ve ever played a First Person Shooter-style video game. Your character typically moves forward and backward using the left thumbstick up and down directions (or W and S on a keyboard), and looks around using the right thumbstick (or the mouse if you’re using a mouse). Your character “strafes” when using left and right on a thumbstick (or A and D on a keyboard). It’s just another way of saying “move side to side without turning”.
The robot (both real and virtual) uses special wheels that allow it to strafe when all four turn in the correct direction in relation to each other. Those who want to try and figure it out on their own should use the app and experiment with different values. If you have tried this and given up (or if you prefer to start with a hint), we’ll give you some of values to get started with. You can fill in the rest.
On the next page we’ll give you a few strafing problems to figure out.