STEAM Team

Greetings from the STEAM Team! It’s been a busy year for us, and there’s lots to share. We participated in two robotics competitions, held an Egg Drop competition, and received generous funding from the school’s Innovate Grant. Read all about it below!

RoboCup Junior

RoboCup Junior is an international tournament for students to compete building robots for a variety of tasks. This year, the STEAM Team set the goal of participating in the Rescue Competition – building a robot to navigate a complex maze of lines and “rescue” a tin can from a simulated oil spill at the end. It was a lot of fun and a huge learning process.

We successfully entered with two teams at both the Melbourne Regional (July 28) and Victorian State (August 14) competitions. Our teams were the Northcote Tasers and the Northcote Stun-Guns, aptly named for our technological tinkerers. The Tasers entered with their own custom-built robot, using an RC tank and a programmed Arduino to control it, while the Stun-Guns built a more traditional entry using a Lego MindStorms kit made possible by the Innovate Grant.

Both teams did incredibly well for our first time competing, and are excited to give it another go in 2019. Of particular note is our Stun-Guns at the Victorian State competition, who got a perfect score on 3 of their 5 rounds. Well done everyone!

Egg Drop

To kick off Term 4 as part of Design Week, our STEAM Team hosted an Egg Drop competition – competitors had to design and build a contraption that would protect an egg from being dropped off the Upper B Block walkway. Every egg that didn’t break won a prize, with grand prizes for the fastest (protected) drops!

We started the week with a construction workshop, providing supplies and advice, then on Thursday October 18 we hosted the competition on the B Block walkway. We had a great turnout, with many creative contributions, and more than 10 teams succeeded in protecting their eggs! Our grand victor proved that sometimes simple is best, using his backpack as the vessel. Who could have guessed?

Innovate Grant

This year we were fortunate to gain funding from the Northcote Innovate Grant to fund the purchase of a Lego Mindstorms robot, which we used to compete in the RoboCup Junior Tournament. One of our members, Jude Pinnuck, wrote this summary of the project:

Project: To make a robot and enter it in RoboCup

Budget and grant amount: $395

Actions:

We purchased a Lego MindStorms building kit. We looked at some robot designs online and modified them. We wrote programs, each different but with the same principal, and each time we tested our robot we changed what was wrong by either altering the parts or writing new programs.

When we showed up on the contest day we had to rebuild the robot, and reconnect to the controller, Dominic’s laptop, which we had trouble doing for some reason. We also began to realise the problems with our programs and had to rewrite them, and we tested the program with trial and error.

Outcome:

We were successful – we understood what to do and how to do it (we just didn’t do it well). We knew how our robot worked, how to use it, and what was wrong with it, and potentially we could have won the contest. We tried our hardest, knew what to do, and we got a good score.

Advice for future Innovate applicants:

You should always understand what’s happening, not what will happen.