From the Head of Junior School

On Monday the Junior School STIGIT members participated in the RoboCup Junior competition. In preparation for this inter-school competition, our students had been diligently working on their robotics during their co-curricular lessons since the beginning of the year. We entered six teams in the competition.

Two teams entered the Sumo wrestling competition, whereby two robots battled each other in a Sumo ring, until one robot was forced out. The teams involved were JEL (Elijah Iona, Lucas Wong, Jordan Zacharia Henley, and Patrick Beltrame) and Spike #7 (Iverson Fah and Laurel Yang). Both teams gallantly battled against their opposition robots and JEL made it through to the quarterfinals.

Four teams entered the Rescue competition, whereby they had to program their robots to follow a line to rescue a ‘victim’ from a ‘chemical spill’. There were many obstacles and programming complexities along the way. The teams involved were Bread (Inesh Chauhan, Jack James, William Wang), Electrons (Samuel Ng, Xavier Ritchie), Roasted Cans with Bread (Claude Chua, Luca Paris, Wayne Qian), and Robo Rescuers (Remy Ikonomakis and Jonathan Kassara). Robo Rescuers made it through to the finals and finished in third place, winning a trophy.

Overall the day was a fun and valuable learning experience. Students learned resilience and patience and were proud of their achievements, continually working on improving their results for every round. Students were able to view other competitions, and many are excited to return next year and continue to strive to progress further.

Thank you to the staff, Xenia Iona and Vicky Wingrave, who have shared their expertise of robotics and coding, and in particular Lee McNamara, our teacher who inspires and challenges the children in the day-to-day teaching in our Digitial & Design Robotics Lab. It is important that our schools be places for educational investigation, true laboratories of learning in a world that’s increasingly technical and shaped by the digital culture in which our students are raised. Experiences such as these offer new possibilities for our children, who also have a hand in shaping the future.

Nic Boys
Head of Junior School