Skills Challenge

From a meeting of Warren-Blackwood School Principals, an idea was put forward for the primary schools in the area to compete in a robotics competition.

Kylie Loney, Principal of Greenbushes Primary School, approached Talison Lithium to help with the funding. Talison’s contribution enabled Robotics kits to be purchased for each primary school in Balingup, Kirup, Greenbushes, Boyup Brook, Bridgetown and Manjimup, to compete in the VEX IQ competition.

VEX IQ is a competition for primary school students only. The students design, build, program and drive a robot to complete the challenge as best as they can.

Each VEX IQ Robotics kit is made up of plastic pieces that snap together using pegs, and constructing a robot is fairly straightforward. The students use graphical software to program the robot.

There are two parts to the competition day: Robot Skills, in which a single robot attempts to score as many points as possible, and the Teamwork Challenge, in which two robots attempt to work together to complete the same task.

Mrs Kylie Loney enthusiastically talks about the contest, “The curriculum throughout primary schools includes science, technologies, and even physics, and we understand how important these subjects will be in our students’ future.

“Primary school is formative time in a student’s life. We work hard to instill a lifelong interest in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by providing fun, engaging and hands-on opportunities to explore and experience it for themselves.

“The Vex IQ challenge helps to build students’ passion for STEM subjects. Hands-on experience gives students technical knowledge, and the nature of this competition means that students also build communication and teamwork skills. “We chose the students who would compete from our year six cohort, this being the last year they could enter the contest.

“They did very well and we are proud of their achievements, they came third in the contest.”

The four students from Greenbushes Primary who competed were, Edyn Hardy, Tessa Scovell, Shenae Woodall and Tobin Russell.

Let’s hear from the Greenbushes students who took part in the challenge, all four students spoke well with a confident manner.

Edyn Hardy said, “I found competition to be lots of fun, we built a standard ‘bot’ and it worked to our advantage. Another school in the competition had modified their ‘bot’ and during the competition it had a problem, it kept toppling over.

“I enjoyed the experience, it was a lot of fun, but because I love being outside in the open, I’m not sure if I will pursue robotics in the future.”

Shenae Woodall elaborated, “Greenbushes and Kirup schools had a combined workshop on building the ‘bots’, and once the basics were explained to us, we were underway.

“The ‘bot’ design we built was the one in the instruction booklet, although this didn’t stop us putting pieces together back to front or on the wrong side, but together we worked it out.

“After building our ‘bot’ we had trouble setting up the wireless operation, but with the instructor’s help it was soon remedied.

“We all worked well together, with certain challenges we had to work in pairs, but we certainly did well in the competition.”

Tobin Russell was keen to add, “I’ve really like working with the ‘bots’, I have a remote-control toy at home, I like computer games and found I was good at moving the ‘bot’ around the board without bumping into objects.

“That was my advantage.”

Tessa Scovell enthusiastically went on say, “We did make a few improvements to our ‘bot’ which were clever, we added rubber bands to its claw grip, which worked well.

“We practiced a lot, Tobin was certainly the quickest around the board, we were all happy to compete and we enjoy the experience.

“The four of us worked well together and competed well.

“We have other computer programs we work with at school, but these mostly involve coding to move objects around on a screen. The robot challenge involves moving and controlling a machine on a rectangular field; it was different and more of a challenge.”

The four students were all pleased with the competition and their placing. Edyn, Shenae and Tessa are all going on to Bridgetown High School next year with Tobin going on to Newton Moore in Bunbury.