Starting back in November a group of Year 10 students attended a number of workshops to learn about robotics. These included three after school sessions, a day at the Stephen Lawrence Centre and two Saturday sessions.
At this point 30 students from three schools were involved. Out of the ten students from Conisborough College, Alice Wilcox, Chloe Green and Jamie Walder were offered a place on the team of 14 that travelled to Annapolis to compete.
The robotics team pose proudly with their ‘Most Inspiring Rookie Robotics Team’ trophy
The team had just 6½ weeks to build a robot that could compete in a game. This year the game was called ‘First Overdrive’. It involved the robots in using a mixture of inbuilt software and radio control to drive around a circuit manoeuvring 40′ (101cm) track balls and passing them over a 6′ (183cm) high frame. The robots competed in randomly selected teams of three, meaning that the students had to work with students from American schools and colleges.
Considering this was the first time that staff and students from Conisborough College and Addey and Stanhope schools had competed in the competition and were doing so at a huge disadvantage (in terms of funding and being able to transport resources to the competition) our final position of 42nd out of 62 teams was amazing.
We finished ahead of some very competent teams with sponsorship from the likes of NASA and General Motors. This achievement was recognised by the judges awarding a trophy for being the ‘Most Inspiring Rookie Team’ with them highlighting the amount achieved with limited resources and also the fact that the team had promoted engineering by being mentioned on several TV news reports.