Scotch College

Robotics National Championships

On Friday 5th September, 2003, five Year Six students accompanied by Ms Jocelyn Pride and Mr Gareth Smith embarked on an adventure to Brisbane. The boys:- Nick Bernard, Alex Gaynor, Nick Jarman, Adrian Li and Dylan Mavros - made up the robotics team that was the first team to represent Scotch Junior School in the National Robotics Championships held in Brisbane. Robotics is an extremely challenging activity that encapsulates a variety of skills across all subject areas as well as developing teamwork and problem solving strategies. Our team name was 'Team Alpha', signifying the first Scotch team to enter this competition. The event was split into three disciplines with our boys competing in the 'dance' section. The object of this section is for the team to build and program a robot (or robots) to dance to a piece of music. Each of the boys was selected from the huge number of boys interested in robotics in Year Six. Their individual skills were matched to make the best possible team. Many of the Year Six boys competed in the Victorian Robotics Championships held at Trinity College in August and our team for the Nationals was based on each boy's involvement in the State titles.

'Team Alpha' worked solidly for three weeks overcoming every problem possibly imaginable to come up with a superb concept and performance. They built two robots and their performance was based on the music from the Batman movie. One of the robots took on the character of the 'Batmobile' and the other robot was the 'Joker'. The performance told a story and the boys even provided a musical interlude where they played their instruments. The programming of robots is an extremely technical and mathematically challenging activity and our boys excelled in this area.

During the competition the boys had to work entirely on their own in a separate area to the staff. This enabled them to prepare everything themselves and certainly helped them become independent and great team members.

The competition was held over two days and we were fortunate enough to make the finals that were held on Sunday 7th September. Considering the 'Batmobile' had a lot of trouble handling the different floor surface we were pleasantly surprised to be rated so highly. The boys' success was assisted by their outstanding interview skills when they were asked to explain their program etc. On the Sunday the boys worked hard to overcome the problems associated with the robot moving over the floor surface and their performance was outstanding. Their overall result put them into sixth place which was a brilliant achievement. Above all the boys gained a great deal out of the weekend of competition and they are to be highly commended on the way they conducted themselves and represented their school. We look forward to this being an ongoing activity as part of the Year Six curriculum.

Jocelyn Pride
Year Six Coordinator