‘Time’ is always a challenge at school, so preparing for a robotics competition was going to mean extra time outside of school. Today, being Sunday, from 10am till 2pm some of our team members met to develop our entry.
Team members have identified a problem for this year’s theme ‘Animal Allies’ which demonstrates human interactions with animals,
sometimes people help animals and sometimes animals help people. Our task is to make our interactions with animals better. As a group we voted to look at the impact cane toads have on the lives of humans, in particular their pets. Plenty of research and constructing emails, to professionals in the field, and discussing possible ways of over-coming the problem of cane toads eating pet food …….with some very amusing and interesting ideas!
Dividing our time between designing prototypes to solve our problem and completing the building of the last few components of the set missions, we were able to be quite productive. We are fortunate to have a Year 10 student, who has been in previous competitions, to assist our Year 5 & 6 students tackle the building and programming of our robot. It was great to listen to a Year 5 student suggesting and solving problems about manoeuvring the robot and adding design features to correct its capabilities.
We have organised to have another weekend session soon.
