On the 28th of May, four Year 7s (Chauntelle, Lucas, Mokoia and Jodie) along with our science teacher, Miss Batters, were selected to go to an event at Bream Bay College called Robocup Junior. Throughout the day we were learning how to program a robot on a Lego ev3 block.

Firstly, we built our robot using Lego pieces and motors, we were not allowed to use wheels on our first attempt.  We then set up a program on a computer that would make our robot move which we then downloaded to the evo3 block. The ev3 block would be connected to 2 motors and would make them do what we programmed using the Mindstorm app. We found it difficult to build a moving robot and our first attempt made one rotation and then fell over.  But we learnt from that and then created a new robot with wheels. It was really fun building the robot around the ev3 block with bits of Lego and wheels. We were then given the task to make our robot dance to a piece of music. We worked well as a team and came up with a short program that made the robot dance.

The day was intended to teach us students and our teacher how to program a robot so one day we could potentially enter a robot in the Robocup Junior competition. It would be really cool to get a school robot kit so we can one day enter this competition.

“I enjoyed making and programing. Meeting students from other schools was exciting and fun as well. The experience was great.” Jodie Wellood
“I really enjoyed the experience and got a lot of knowledge from this day” Lucas Hassall
“I learnt a lot of knowledge on this day, we didn’t have much prior knowledge, so it was good experience.” Chauntelle Lord
“I learnt that robots are really hard to make without wheels” Mokoia Llewell