King’s Ely students pick up design award at RoboCon 2019

King’s Ely Senior students competed in RoboCon for the first ever time this year – and won the Best Engineering Design award for one of their robots.

Two teams of Year 9 pupils entered the competition, which took place in Cambridge during the Easter holidays. RoboCon is a robotics competition aimed at students in Years 9 to 11. It is free to enter and encourages pupils to build a basic robot to run in the competition. They can add to it however they like; the only limit is their imagination!

Throughout the Lent term, the King’s Ely students worked hard to each build a robot that could collect cubes and return them to their base in a set time. They had to collect their own coloured cubes and no one else’s. The robots had to be autonomous, in that they had to be programmed to do this without human intervention.

One team was led by James Schoenberg and the other team consisted of Jonathan Iles, Johnnie Rudd, William Biggs and Joseph Coppin. Fourteen local schools competed in the event and although neither of King’s Ely’s teams got through to the final stages, the team of Jonathan, Johnnie, William and Joseph won the award for Best Engineering Design for their robot.

Head of ICT and Computing at King's Ely Senior, Marc Hawes, said: “This was King’s Ely’s first time entering RoboCon and we will be entering again next year for sure. Well done to the students for their hard work both in the build-up and during the competition!”