A new and exciting STEM competition kicked off on Saturday morning at a school in North London. Vex Robotics is an engineering and coding competition, where teams of students design, build and program a robot vehicle to carry out a range of tasks in a competitive arena. Many of the other schools had developed their robot vehicle over a number of years, so we were very much at the start of a long journey of iterative design.

Each round of the tournament involved 4 robots, battling to place objects in specific parts of the court. Although there was meant to be very little contact between the robots, this rule seemed to be ignored by most and our robot ‘Gertrude’ was picked on, knocked about and flipped by some of the other bigger ones!

Despite being a little damaged by this experience, ‘Gertrude’ will fight on again in January, when we enter another tournament. Hopefully, with the benefit of experience and the application of the iterative design process, our robot will be stronger and more able to take up the challenges it will face.

The photos show the superb students that have worked so tirelessly on this project: Trishan Chudasma, Alex Ciz Yori, Darius Oprea, Om Panchal and Veer Anand.

Well done team SPECTRUM!