Recently one of our more unusual teams took part in a county wide event. The team I’m talking about is the ORCs Robot Club. We build and program robots to complete a series of tasks on a large table, the surprising thing is that all of these robots and challenges are made of LEGO.

The competition was held at the University of Kent. We had plenty of time to continue tinkering with our robot, which is a good thing as it could only complete one challenge out of over ten.

With our first attempt at the ‘table of challenges’ we managed to do 4 tasks which took us to forth place.

We then had to do a presentation about electricity production and usage within the school. In this we showed how energy is produced via induction and spoke about our eco-schools work this, to our excitement, took us to joint second place.

 In the third challenge we had to put a model water turbine in the sea, the robot decided to crush it against a house, losing its bumper in the process. The robot also knocked over trees and a coal truck, pushed a truck into the sea and threw a hydro-electric dam and power lines over a power station. This dragged us back to seventh place!

We just got into the next round in which we lost with dignity to a good team. We planted trees, put up wind turbines, placed a wave turbine, hooked up power lines, lowered the solar panels on a satellite and replaced a dirty petrol truck with a clean hydrogen car.

So a good day was had by all who attended. There was with a medal and trophy ceremony at the end with all participants winning medals. We came 4th out 15 competitors!