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Year 7 & 8 Robotics club wins best LEGO robot design in 2017 Tomorrow’s Engineers EEP Robotics Challenge
Within five months of being offered a place on the ‘Tomorrow’s Engineers EEP (Elite Engineering Programme) Robotics Challenge’, our team of enthusiastic Year 7 and 8 students gained an amazing array of skills and knowledge about robotics, programming, space and engineering which was demonstrated at the Regional Competition on 6th March in ‘The Silk Mill’, Derby.
Miss Hafiz and Mrs Boulton-Pratt attended a training session back in October 2017, where they received instructions about the challenge - including £2000 of LEGO robotics and two new sets of software. Software duly installed, an after school club, known as ‘Robotics Club’ was formed to take on the challenge. Throughout, our girls had to learn how to build, program and control autonomous LEGO robots to complete seven ‘space missions’ using LEGO Mindstorms Education EV3 sets.
Miss Hafiz and Dr Roz accompanied the girls on competition day – everyone was very excited and nervous! On our arrival, there were 9 other participating schools that we were up against. During the day, our team were judged on the following and points were awarded for: Best Robot Design; Project Presentation, Robot Challenge and Teamwork Challenge.
After the challenges were completed, we waited patiently for the awards presentation. Once announced that Sheffield High School had won the prize for ‘Best Robot Design’, we were all shocked, excited and happy! We were awarded the trophy and although the girls did not have the fanciest robot, they did exceptionally well when they spoke to the judges during their presentation. We also received a certificate of our achievement and were given a box of Celebrations which, as you can imagine, was demolished straightaway!
The National competition will be at The Big Bang Fair in Birmingham on the 17th March. Unfortunately, we did not make it through to this round. However, there are a few wildcard spaces, so fingers crossed! We hope to resume ‘Robotics Club’ after Easter for further practice as Royal Air Force will be sponsoring the challenge in 2018 and we hope to be in it next year!
A big massive thank you to the girls for their amazing achievement and hard work. Though this was not everyone from the club, those who participated in the Regional Competition were: Alisa Ivanov, Millie Sadiq, Ines Bell, Isabel Scott, Mara Sergienko, Zahra Abdullah, Eva Jurela-Glavina and Maria Christofilopoulou. Finally, another huge thank you to Mrs Boulton Pratt, Mrs Morton, Dr Roz and Miss Hafiz for assisting and supporting the girls throughout – a real team effort from all.