On 31st January, 2022, the school entered a robotics team of seven pupils (Isacc Carney, George Cornett, Patryk Golaszewski, Ethan Hughes, Jonah Collins, Harry Stenton, Aled Vickers) to compete in the FIRST LEGO League Robotics Competition at Manchester University.
The competition was organised under the theme, ‘Cargo Connect’ which encouraged the pupils to research and learn about problems in moving goods across land and sea, whilst considering alternative transportation and offer up a solution.
The team devised an idea of using a hyperloop to solve some of these problems and presented this idea to the judges at the competition in the form of a televised journalist report. This was well received, and it gave the pupils time to talk about the design of their robot and explore some of the key values they demonstrated in line with competition expectations.
The team would find themselves competing against seven other local schools in a tense regional final. The competition consistently saw our robot gain 255, 235 and 245 points out of 670 points across three separate rounds each of two and half minutes respectively.
Although other teams came close, no other robot actually beat our scores and meant that the pupils were able to walk away with ‘the best robot in competition’ award. This was a credit to all the hard work and time the pupils had put into developing and testing the robot and the pupils are adamant that they want to return to the competition next year and improve on their performance.