Students from St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School recently competed at the state RoboCup Junior Victoria competition at Melbourne University with two teams placing in the top ten in their division.
St Paul’s had five teams compete in the Riley Rover Division, one team in the Primary Division and four teams in the Secondary Division.
With a total of 25 students, the teams comprised of students from Years 5 through to Year 8 from both the St Paul’s Traralgon and Warragul Junior Schools and Warragul Secondary School.
This was the first state competition for most students and they had trained for many hours leading up to the event, programming, testing and rebuilding their robots to compete in a competition that had a total of 167 other teams from around Victoria.
The teams were required to complete five rounds in a two minute time limit, their robots navigating their way around a black line and obstacles, and over speed humps, to rescue a victim from a ‘chemical spill’ with each course setup increasing in difficulty each round.
Some of the robots performed extremely well, while others experienced slight glitches and needed some modifications and adjustments to their programming.
The students had to work independently to solve the issues and also had to prepare for an interview with representatives from RoboCup Junior Victoria.
Two St Paul’s secondary teams placed in the top ten in their division out of 53 teams with team ‘Fire Power’ placing sixth overall and team ‘Robot Max’ placing eighth overall.
