Students from Applecross and Lynwood Senior High Schools recently put their robotics skills to the test at Curtin University, taking part in the WA Robotics Playoffs 2022.
The Playoffs, now in their second year, saw twenty teams of high school students aged between 13 and 17 collaborate and compete with their very own designed robots, with most coming in at about 40 kilograms, in a three-on-three, basketball style competition over two days.
Organiser Tim Keely said the competition was an official off-season event that is part of the international robotics competition FIRST Robotics Competition.
Previously, students from Curtin, mentoring high-school students, flew to Sydney’s Macquarie University to take part in the event, but with the COVID pandemic, Mr Keely said he and a colleague at Murdoch University decided to do it themselves.
“We had grant money that we needed to spend to get kids to a robotics competition, which we couldn’t do, so we thought ‘bugger it’, we’ll put our own competition on, and we had enough teams to hold the competition,” he said.
“That’s how it started in WA and it’s going from strength to strength, and the collaboration between teams is huge.
“When you play a match, you’ve got three teams playing against three teams, and your alliance is randomly assigned for the first day, and you can’t to help the teams you’re with get better at building their robot, so your alliance can do better.
“So you’re literally helping with building, with parts, with coding, all that through the first day.
“When it gets to the finals, you can choose your own alliance based on the points you scored on the first day, so there’s some strategy about which three robots work better together.
“That’s the really interesting thing about it, the strategy and the alliances.”
The matches feature two ‘goals’ that robots can deposit balls into, one lower and one higher, with teams able to block, meaning repairs area a running concern.
“When they bump, they bump pretty hard, they’re 40 to 50kg robots to there’s some definitely some damage but there’s not element of attacking.
“You can block but there are referees calling fouls.”
The eventual winners were a team consisting of Armadale Senior High School, Jurien Bay and a Bunbury student.
