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RoboCupJunior Te Tai Tokerau

This blog has been sitting in my drafts for several months, finally got a chance to finish it! Better late than never right!!

For the past four years I have prepared and taken a team to compete in the First Lego League competition in Auckland. This has always been a great learning experience and a highlight of the students' year but the cost of buying the kit each season is high as well as organising and funding a trip to Auckland and taking a day out of my weekend with my family.

So this year I decided to try and bring an event north. In setting up our space at the start of the year I made a connection with Joanna from MTA who runs workshops on using the EV3 and was keen to support my idea. Joanna was involved in RoboCup and recommended we have a go at this format as it is much more accessible with only a $40 entry fee and there is more flexibility around the robots that can be used.

Joanna came up and ran a free workshop in May, introducing us to the Dance/Theatre format. We had four other schools attend this workshop and it was a great, fun, collaborative day.


We then began preparing in earnest, meeting every lunch time possible! The creativity and freedom that this format allowed was fantastic and my teams came up with great ideas.

We had three schools and groups register for the Rescue event which involves programming a robot to follow a black line to rescue a 'victim'. Unfortunately in the week before the competition the other team that was going to compete in the Theatre event pulled out as they weren't ready so it was just my two teams that competed in the Theatre event.

We were lucky to have support Andrew and Aaron from Refining New Zealand, Nathan Bromberg, our Tahi Rua Toru Tech mentor and Ross Scobie, my dad who judged the events for us. Refining New Zealand also provided us with a professional photographer for the day which was great!

The event went off without a hitch and it was so fantastic to see the students collaborating and supporting each other even between teams. I'll let the photos tell the story!









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