After only a few months of learning Damla college year six and seven students made their mark in one of the state’s biggest school robotics competition.
The Ferndale school’s students beat almost 600 teams to make it to the top 10 of the soccer and rescue events in the 2015 robocup junior robotics competition on August 7 and 8.
The competition pitted the students’ creativity and engineering skills against each other as they tried to make the best lego mindstorm robot to complete various challenges.
The soccer event saw two teams with two robots attempt to kick as many goals in two halves.
The rescue event mirrored a real life robot rescue with the students’ lego robots travelling through a field of obstacles before pushing an object away from a ‘chemical spill’.
Damla college student Yunus Layic made it to the top eight in the state for the rescue category while the school’s soccer team reached the quarter-finals.
Damla robotics teacher Alper Ciftci was proud of his students especially given they only started the class in term two.
“Towards the end of term one we had expressions of interest for a robotics class,” he said.
“The first week of term two that’s when we actually started teaching.
“To start the students did a couple of things together, they built the robot together, making it mechanically perfect.
“They also learned computer programming for the robot and made the robot do certain things for certain purposes.
“Once we reached a certain knowledge level with the students we started to train for the competition.”
He said the students loved learning about robotics.
“Students enjoyed it a lot because there was mathematics involved, physics, engineering, thinking and fun,” he said.
Damla year seven robotics student Murad Umur said his favourite part was the design and building of the robot.
“I was interested in programming but I liked building the robot more,” he said.
“It was my first experience we with robots and the competition was really nice, I enjoyed watching our robots on the field and scoring it was a really fun competition to compete in.”
Fellow year seven student Osama Kordi enjoyed the competition because he saw other robots.
“So I could learn how to improve a new robot,” he said.
