Over the past two terms, selected students from our Honours Program participated in a two hour robotics program working with the EV3 robots. Mark Bowman and I worked together to implement this program which ran each Friday morning. Students worked in teams of two or three and used the LEGO Mindstorm EV3 program to learn the necessary building, processing and coding skills to make their own EV3 robots. Throughout the training period, students completed various levelled tasks until they were proficient enough to code independently without the prompts from the Mindstorm coding program.

To finish off the program, all teams competed against each other in an inhouse robotics competition called “The Big League”. In this competition, each team selected two or more challenges from a list which were valued with points depending on the level of difficulty. Each challenge was worth a set number of points, so teams had to achieve their highest possible score within the time permitted. The robot had to operate on pre-programmed instructions, and complete as many scoring tasks within a two minute timeframe. Each team had two runs of the challenge which gave them four minutes in total to gather as many points as possible.

The teams involved included:

Yr 6 Hayden F and Connor W
Yr 6 Isabella B and Connor C
Yr 6 Chelsea B and Chloe R
Yr 5 Abi V and Matthew O
Yr 5 Archie C, Joshua N and Harry P
Yr 4 Oliver L, Micah MF and Indie H

“The Big League” was held on Friday 20 November at first break. Many students from the Primary School came to watch the competition which was held in the new Honours classroom. Each team was excited but nervous as they completed their challenges, hoping that their pre-coded programs would work. Some programs were successful, while others were not. All students did an excellent job and it was a close competition but one team came out on top. Chelsea and Chloe were pronounced the “Robotics Master” for 2020 receiving a total of 90 points. A special mention was also made to Abi and Matthew for receiving the title of “ACE Run” which was for doing the quickest time in completing a challenge.

All of the students worked very hard throughout the Robotics Program and learnt a lot about coding, problem solving and working together as a team. It was a wonderful experience for each student and each team should be proud of their efforts. It was a joy to watch them challenge themselves and grow in their learning.

Sarah Jennings, Gifted and Talented Coordinator

GCC families can see all the photos on Pixevety: Robotics 2020