On Friday 15 August, a team of Year 8s and a team of Year 11s competed in RoboCup Junior, a worldwide competition that encourages the development of 21st century skills such as problem solving, collaboration and resilience.

The students have spent Thursday lunchtimes in the RoboCup Co-curricular Club, designing and programming their robots to complete a number of autonomous challenges. The Year 8 team of Pippa H and Annika S competed in the Soccer competition, where they were pitted against a number of other schools in a series of two-on-two robot matches. They managed to reach the Grand Final, and were just pipped in the second half. Their robots had to track the ball using infrared sensors, capture it, and propel it towards the goal using a gyroscope to determine the correct direction. With a number of innovative strategies such as detecting and avoiding the walls (and a little luck!) their robots proved hard to beat.

The Year 11 team of Caitlin S, Sarah C, Claire L, Anna L, and Ashkeet B competed in the Rescue Line competition, where they had to navigate a series of obstacles on a number of different tracks. Each track varied in layout and complexity, and culminated in the robot having to rescue a victim from a 'chemical spill.' They used a combination of ultrasonic and colour sensors with complex programming to track the lines, navigate obstacles, climb over ramps, and detect, capture and move the victim out of the spill area. They competed over five courses in the heats scoring very well, then won the final over a very complex course, finishing first in their division!

RoboCup Junior is designed to encourage students to go beyond their comfort zone, work as a team, and think on the fly to find ways to work around the issues that inevitably arise on the day. The emphasis is on the journey rather than winning, and it was wonderful to see the way our students approached the challenges throughout the year and at the competition. They conducted themselves very well, supporting each other, and both winning and losing with grace. It was fantastic that they got to have such great success!

Congratulations to both our teams!

Mr Simon Dorrat
Head of Digital Learning