Electronics visit to Newbury

QR code for this page. Right click on the image and select 'Copy image' or 'Save image as...' to take a copy of this QR code. Add it to a worksheet for students to scan and jump immediately to this page. Or just display this pop-up box on your classroom projector.

At the beginning of this month, nine students from Years 10 and 11 visited the annual Student Robotics competition at the Newbury Racecourse Grandstand. After a quick look at the competition the boys were allowed to roam around the three floors of the building: the ground floor, where the two arenas housed the main event; the first floor, which housed the refreshments and some practice arenas and cubes; and the second floor, where the people behind the robots pored over code on their computers in desperate last-minute attempts to debug their robots.

The competition itself was composed of two to four handmade robots, usually constructed out of variations on wood, plastic and metal frames with a plethora of different functional pieces, such as claws or vacuums, attempting to orient coloured cubes so that their allocated colour was facing up for 1 point and then moving the cube to their corner of the arena for an extra point. The competition began on 30th April with a league, which continued into day two of the competition, which the boys watched. The competition then entered a knockout round leading up to the final, which was won by RGS Guildford.

The main aim for the visit was for the boys to look at this year’s competition to get an idea about what they should do when participating in next year’s competition, what they should build their robot out of, and how they should go about coding it.

Overall the boys got a lot out of the trip and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you to Ms Timpson for organising the trip as well as Mr Silvester and Miss Binion for accompanying the trip.