On Monday 28 April 10 teams (24 students) from year 4 and 5 competed in the Annual Gold Coast Sumo Robotics championships. Using robots they built, they competed in a sumo wrestling match, aiming to push their opponents out of the ring.
Our students competed against 112 teams from 16 schools from the region. Since the start of Term 4, 2024, our robotics students have spent 2 lunch times a week learning how to build and code Lego robots. This involved engineering their robots to give themselves the best competition advantages by considering speed, weight, dimensions and attachments. A sumo battle requires a robot to stay within the black competition ring, find their opponent, and push them out of the ring. Competition day saw high excitement and energy from the 400 plus students in the hall. Over the day nearly 800 battles took place. They each had 13 battles against other teams within their division.
Our teams and their wins!
Zac and Harrison – 11/13 Division runner up
Soda and Nova – 11/13 Division runner up
Sonny, Levi and Eddie – 10/13 Judges award
Shreyan and Indianna – 10/13
Samantha and Anya 10/13 Division runner up and Judges award
Walker, Imogen and Emmett – 9/13 Inspire award
Mason, Harry and Lucas – 9/13
Zahli and Lily – 8/13
Arav and Beau – 5/13
Elianna, Elliot and Manu – 4/13
We had 5 teams in the top 32 in the competition and one team progressed to the top 8. We won 6 awards on the day – 2 x judges award, 1 x inspire award, 3 x district runner ups. Congratulations to all competitors on your persistence, sportsmanship, determination, and reliability. We are so proud of these children and how they managed to independently be at the right competition field, at the right time to play each match. Out of the 130 matches we played I only had to find and direct one team for one match to the right spot! Incredible effort.
The school runs Robotics clubs at lunch time for interested students from Year 2 to 6. All students are given the opportunity to join in, and we teach them a range of different skills using robots such as Sphero, Dash, Lego EV3 and Lego Spike. They are taught basic programming skills with increasing difficulty as they progress through the clubs. Next term, more students will be given the opportunity to try out the wonders of robotics. The only criteria for the students, is a commitment to coming every week for the term. We thank and congratulate all our team members and look forward to more successes in the future! Tell you students to look out for announcements on assembly.
Article by Sharon Prior and Jessica Mann.