Scotch College

National RoboCup Championships

The Junior School Robotics team, ‘The X-Plosive Gadgets’, competed in the ‘Primary Dance’ division against 42 teams from around Australia, in the National RoboCup Championships held in Sydney over the Fathers’ Day weekend. The team consisted of ten Year 6 boys: David Barrell, Ryan Erskine, Francis Ha, Robert Hayes, James Mullaly, Aiton McPhee, James Mullaly, David Newland, Eric Saliwonczyk and Stuart Sim. The team had less than three weeks to prepare for the competition and they spent virtually every waking moment, including the weekends, building and programming their robots.

This year the students built on previous skills and combined electronics with robotics to build a transmitter and a set of receivers. These were attached to each robot to enable the computer program to be communicated simultaneously in a sophisticated manner.

The boys created four robots including ‘Inspector Gadget’ who despite his size displayed superb flexibility and had a few tricks up his sleeve that surprised and fascinated the audience. The powerful music the boys blended together in GarageBand complemented the movement of the robots beautifully, and in the finale to the performance, party poppers exploded out of a cave that housed a robot the boys named ‘Dr Claw.’ Two robotic police cars using light sensors to follow a course on the edge of the performance area completed the story.

The standard of competition was extremely high and the X-Plosive Gadgets were thrilled to be runners up to a sensational team from Queensland. Each of the top three teams gave a perfect performance in the finals and the organisers unanimously agreed that the bar had certainly been raised for future competitions. Our boys also gained a perfect score in their interview, which carries 40 per cent of the total score.

This was a significant achievement as it meant the boys could clearly explain the complexity of their robots and programming. Above all, they displayed outstanding teamwork throughout the entire weekend and were a credit to the school.

Jocelyn Pride
Year 6 Coordinator