BBNS win 4 Awards including Overall Award at VEX Finals!
Today, Bandonbridge NS 5th Class travelled to MTU, Cork to compete in the Regional VEX finals. Since starting the project in October, the students had shown diligence, creativity and determination in creating 5 cutting-edge robots. After their in-school competition in April, one robot was selected to go forward to represent the school in the finals. Max and Mikayla were the builders and drivers of this robot, and they were among the first to arrive at MTU to begin the driver challenges this morning. They achieved the highest score on the arena of 42, coming first in the robot driver skills section. An amazing achievement!
Next, the rest of the class arrived on the bus. At this point, Flynn and Eli competed in the programming skills challenge, putting their intricately designed programmes to the test against the rest of the schools. Again, they came up tops in the competition, scoring 32 points and outscoring the next best by 22 points! A tremendous achievement. Both their programming, and Max and Mikayla's driving performances, led to them later winning the Robot Skills Award.
After that, the teamwork challenge competition began. This involved schools working together in pairs on the arena to get the maximum points possible. See video below:
Again, Bandonbridge came out as the top qualifying team in this challenge, which led to them entering into the final contest of the day. Both Max and Mikayla showed amazing composure on the big stage, with everyone in the hall watching on, to clinch the highest score. That meant they would also scoop the Teamwork Challenge Award later on.
At lunchtime we had a walk around the MTU campus - maybe some of these students will be inspired to study a STEM subject here some day in the future...
When it came to the awards presentation, we were all delighted to see our STEM project video shown on the big screen before the presentation began. Liam, Freya, Max and James (with help from many others in the class) did an amazing job in researching how Biomimicry can be used to tackle Ocean pollution. Watch their fantastic project below, which also won the STEM Research project award!
Then came the awards presentation. Bandonbridge were called up three times to the stage to win their Robot Skills, Teamwork Champion and STEM Research Project Awards. Then came the final award, the one everyone had been waiting for - the Excellence award, given to the team who displayed the best overall performance all the day.
A huge cheer went up when Bandonbridge was announced as the winner of the award. This was due in no small part to the wonderful efforts of the Engineering Log Book Team led by Molly and Aoife, who compiled four beautifully designed logbooks tracking the work done in the project. But not only that; the Excellence award is for the whole class effort - programming, driving, log book and teamwork in general.
It must be said that these students thoroughly deserved the recognition they received today. As their teacher, I was immensely proud of how they tackled the project from day one with creativity and enthusiasm. This day will live long in their memory as a reminder of just what can be achieved with hard work and big dreams. Here are some pictures of the class claiming the awards and celebrating after/.
Congratulations to 5th Class! What an amazing achievement!