On Tuesday 14 May 2019, 40 excited Year 9 pupils, in 8 teams, gathered in the Design Faculty to take part in the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) Challenge. Simon Kettle from STEMworks was with us for the day and was one of the judges, along with Mrs Evans, Head of Design. Pupils were eager to start, to decide who was responsible for each role identified in the task and to put down their initial ideas. The task was hard and there were a lot of solutions to be found. They would have to work as a team if they were to succeed.   

The challenge was to build and program a robot to navigate a course and activate a message system. In addition to the robot element, each team needed to build a communications tower, which sent two messages: the first involved raising a flag, the second was a light flashing on and off.  The groups chose a variety of ideas and methods to solve this set problem. Each group successfully raised their flag and caused the bulb to light. 

Pupils worked brilliantly together as teams. Some used a motor to power the raising of the flag, others used counterbalances and pivots. The bulb was lit using a variety of methods too: some groups created their own switches, others used a micro switch.  All of these methods required the robot to trigger them.