Digital Technology News

Robocup Championships

The big news for this term took place the weekend before the term started. Ten students entered robots in the RoboCup Junior Australia national competition in Adelaide, accompanied by Mr Siriamphone (Mr Osi to the students) and Mr Ebert. The competition included 128 teams from across Australia. The event is made up of four different challenges, Soccer, On Stage (robot dance), Rescue Maze and Rescue Line, with each challenge having different divisions depending on year level and experience. Students from Glen Eira College all entered the secondary division of the Rescue Line challenge.

It was a full weekend, meeting early Friday morning at Melbourne Airport and arriving Friday afternoon in Adelaide to begin testing their robots in preparation for the competition on Saturday and Sunday. 

Saturday started bright and early with the Opening Ceremony and time for testing robots before the competition kicked off at 10:30. Over the course of the day, the teams had to run their robots over five progressively more difficult courses with a bit of time in between each round to make improvements. Saturday’s events wrapped up by 5:00, with everyone a bit tired but not so much so that we couldn’t walk into downtown Adelaide for dinner at a nice Italian restaurant (pizza for most). 

Two more competition rounds were run Sunday morning. The top three teams in each division went on to big head-to-head competitions to determine the champions for each division. GEC didn’t have any finalists this year, but they put in a very good effort in a very competitive division that included 35 teams in total.

As their mentor I was very proud of what they achieved over the course of the year considering this was completely new to most of them. There is already talk about how they might improve their robots for next year and even some talk about taking on the challenge of building and coding soccer playing robots.

For all of their efforts, congratulations to each of the teams, Marko and Austin from 7A, Asher from 7B, Oli from 7C, Nicholas and Daniel from 8G, Ryan (8F) and Max (8H), and David and Jamie from 9B.

David Ebert

Technology Learning Area Leader