A group of students from Year 10 and 11 have been working extremely hard over the last few months to design, build and program a VEX robot. They took their robot over to John Warner School to compete in this year’s Robot Rumble competition. The students displayed fantastic teamwork, as they progressed through the competition, they developed their skills and deservedly won the skills challenge trophy.

Robot Rumble has provided students an opportunity to work with engineers from MBDA.

‘On Wednesday, we took part in the Vex V5 High Stakes Game at John Warner School. Before we spent many weeks designing, building and adapting our robot, with dreams to win. The main idea of the game was to collect rings and place them onto stakes, whilst working with another team in an alliance. On the day of the competition, we did last minute adjustments to our robot and code and did last minute additions to our log book in order to show the judges all our progress. 

When we arrived, we saw all of the other team’s robots and realised that different teams focused more on different aspects of the game so they all looked different. At the beginning, there were 30 qualifying games, where everyone was put together with different teams in alliances to put the various teams in ranking order. After this, we were in 11th place and beat Richard Hale! 

After a quick lunch break, all the teams lined up and chose an alliance for the main competition. As we were last to choose, we were placed in an alliance in Richard Hale. In the main competition, we ended up losing our first game and were therefore out of the competition.

However, there was a sub competition which we also entered called the Skills Competition. The aim was to get as many rings onto stakes as possible in a minute. We had three attempts and got 0, then 10 and then 10 points. Overall, we won this competition and received a trophy! We were very excited about this.’

Darcy and Emily