The Easter holiday saw the climax of the Student Robotics competition, in which thirty schools from across the country and also Guernsey and Germany took part in a series of arena games, in which the robots had to autonomously find boxes using clever vision software and 2D barcode style markers. The RGS team, consisting of Aaron Chamberlain, Owen Marlovits, Rex Attwood, Gabriel Correia, Freddie Weir, and Robert Storey, have spent the last six months planning, designing, building, programming and testing the robot. They also took part in a series of challenges and an online, virtual, version of the game, which contributed points to the overall competition. At the end of this phase, the RGS robot was lying in sixth place.

The first day and a half of the competition, held at Southampton University, was a series of league matches, after which the RGS robot had risen to third place, and was performing very encouragingly. We got through the first of the knock-out stages, and we genuinely thought we had a good chance of winning. However, in the quarter-final, some heavy collisions and a piece of really bad luck saw us knocked out. The eventual winners were Haberdashers’ School.

The students deserve a lot of credit for developing a really competitive robot. Over half the team is in the LowerSsixth, so will be able to take part again next year and, hopefully, do even better.

Thanks are due also to Mr Burbidge, the assistant team leader, for his invaluable help and coding expertise.