The Lego Ladies team
Helena Ball, Kira Brightwell, Abigail Faulkner, Peyton Fincher, Emily Finnegan, Charlotte
Hunt, Julia Ignaczewska, Ava Kempson, Evie McCrae, Julietta Morais.
Supported by their Science Teacher Miss Lucy Denton
A team of 10 students from Rugby Free Secondary School took part in the West Midlands
regional final of a robotic engineering competition hosted by “Tomorrow’s Engineers”. All
students at RFSS have been learning to build, programme and control small autonomous
Lego robots as part of their Computing and Technology lessons, and a team of 10 were
selected to represent the school at the regional finals on 3rd March 2017. The students had
spent the last few weeks in sessions working on various aspects of the challenge to prepare
for the contest, which had three main components. The first part tasked them with
designing a robot that could complete a series of seven “space missions” within tight time
constraints. The second was a research project based around some of the real-life problems
that astronauts face on a day-to-day basis and the third was a challenge to test their
teamwork.
Students faced fierce competition from students from 15 other schools across the West
Midlands, at the Lloyds Manufacturing Training Centre in Coventry. The all-girl team of ten
students were successful in their robotics challenges, ensuring that the robot completed all
7 tasks. The team’s success continued, with a fantastic presentation of their research on
how humans can survive in Space that scored very highly with the judging panel of
engineers and professors of engineering. The final teamwork challenge was handled well by
the students, meaning that the RFSS robotics team team had a good chance of coming away
with a prize heading into the results and presentations of awards. In the final ceremony,
Rugby Free Secondary School Students were crowned the highest overall scorers in the
competition and so came away with the cup as Regional winners and will now represent the
West Midlands at the National Finals on Friday 17th March at the NEC in Birmingham.
Mathew Gaynon, Deputy Head at Rugby Free Secondary School, said: “Programmes
like Tomorrow’s Engineers aim to help young people from all backgrounds and abilities
understand the variety and opportunity of a career in engineering and will hopefully
encourage students to pursue careers in the STEM industries. Our focus on STEM subjects at
RFSS has enabled all of our students to experience this project and it’s great to see the final
team of 10 be so successful at the regional finals. Well done to all of the robot engineers,
software programmers and scientific researchers who were part of our team. The students
worked incredibly hard and were an absolute credit to their school and we are so proud of
the students for bringing home the winning trophy.”
Students successfully competing in the robotics challenge on the day.