Technologies

Year 8 Robotics

The Year 8 Robotics students came back to the College after the COVID-related interruption eager to resume our schedule. We missed a few weeks where we should have had more time to build and program our robots, but students had them ready to go in record time.

A challenge was set for the students to program a robot that would race around the track which was laid out on the staff desk with different coloured electrical tape.  Each robot is fitted with a colour sensor that is pointed down to the ground.  The lines marked out on the desk let the robot know which way to go and when to stop.  Red tape told it to turn left, yellow tape was right.  Black was stop and the green was the finish line.

Initially all of the groups had issues with their robots not turning the correct direction or stopping properly, these were overcome and we had varying degrees of success. The group of Saahir Karnam, Beverly Watson and Travis Williams managed to complete the course in 17.1 seconds, and was successful in doing a second and third run. There were two other groups who came very close, but could not quite complete the course, with some of the attempts being frustratingly close.

It says a lot about the enthusiasm of this group of students seeing that they had half the time that they would usually have this term and have managed to complete so much. 

Mr G Hulshoff (Coordinator of Learning Technology)