08 November 2019
During the mid-semester break St Peter’s College had four teams travel to Melbourne to compete in the RoboCup Junior Primary Rescue Competition.
Each team had performed well at the State Competition in Adelaide and had been working since Term 1 on perfecting their robots and code. Each team competed over three days with the top three teams to compete in the finals.
Each course simulates the rescue of people from a chemical spill in a city where it is too dangerous to send rescuers in and a robot is used to find and move them out of the danger zone. Each course is more difficult than the proceeding one. In 2018 we had three teams who competed with our best team achieving 17th place out of 60 teams.
This year, that same team Lochie Siow (Year 6) and Evan Nguyen (Year 6) came fifth and missed out on a spot on the finals by a mere 11 points. Their total score for the nine rounds was 1418. Edward Gross (Year 6) and Charlie Tonkin (Year 6) came ninth with a score of 1241 and Zimu Fan (Year 6), Ahaan Kothari (Year 6) and James Rajapaksa (Year 6) came 23rd with a score of 851 points. Jake Wong (Year 6) also competed independently and came 20th with a score of 965. It was impressive to see how well they performed, how they supported each other and how independent they were in solving any problems that arose. It was also commented on by others on they day how well the students carried themselves.
Colin Becker
Junior School Teacher