St Mary's Calne
Our FIRST LEGO League team, Electrolilies, made their first appearance at the 'FIRST LEGO League Challenge' last week. Our robot, dubbed 'Nitro', was ready to go and our team had worked intensely on the hardware add-ons for the different missions, even working enthusiastically on the Sunday before the competition to make sure all the programs ran smoothly. Our first presentation took place shortly after our arrival with the Science Project proposal to solve global transport and delivery issues with the use of drones. The girls spoke with confidence and with a wealth of detail.
The robotic challenge took place throughout the day. It is fair to say that the girls were very nervous in the first round and frustratingly for them, all that could have gone wrong with the missions, did indeed go wrong, which led to us obtaining a score that was considerably lower than our practice runs in school. The second round was also challenging. Robotics competitions really can be tense and nail biting! In my experience, at this point, the team had a choice - to fall apart or to collect themselves and come out stronger. I am thrilled to say it was the latter. They took the laptop and the robot and reviewed all the code, used the practice table to make sure they could fix issues, adapted the missions and tackled the problem head on. The score in the final third round as a result was much improved but alas, we could not make it to the top eight to access the knockout stage.
I was very pleased to see that the girls had added plenty of detail from their experience into their final programming presentation - clearly a lot of learning had taken place. We will reflect upon these challenges and look forward to coming back next year!
Huge congratulations to our Electrolilies Team who represented St Mary's brilliantly, despite the challenges of the day: Grace (Project Leader), Evie T (Deputy Project Leader), Myra, Alice, Florence, Ines, Alex and India.
Mr Hugo Corripio-Lopez, Head of Computer Science