Offaly Boys represent Offaly in VEX All- Ireland Championships

IN the middle of November, we first started building the arena for the game. This took us two weeks to finish. We then started to build the robot in the manual. We found out that the robot wasn’t suitable because it was too hard to get the discs under the bar.

We then experimented with three other robots but none of them worked right. We then went online and got inspiration from three different people’s robots. We then used three ideas from each robot. This stage took us two months.

We had about two weeks to start and finish the coding. The coding was very hard as you have to be very exact and one degree off could ruin your entire code.

The day for the competition was here! We all walked up to St Brendan’s Community School. There were 26 schools participating. We had a small place to put down our bags and robot.

Our game was first which was nerve racking. Two boys Ben and Yixuan went up and started playing. They both had 30 seconds each to get as many points as possible. We didn’t do too good on the first round but we kept our heads up.

The rest of the games went really well. When the results came we were 1st. It turns out we came first in coding and free driving and second in design! We also got two trophies, the coding award and the excellence award.

We were so happy and we were going to the All Irelands! We got a “guard of honour” off the rest of the boys on our return to school with our trophies.

We had to change robot between both competitions so we spent weeks changing and remodeling the robot. We also got new wheels that made it much easier to drive. We also made the robot smaller so we wouldn’t hit against the pillars in the arena.

The whole class helped by making posters. We made five posters, one was about the history of our school and the others are about the robot itself.

Finally, the day had come. We got a bus at 6.30am to Cork. We got there at around 9am in the morning. When we arrived, we had to go through an inspection to make sure our robot was in order.

Ben and Callum played the first match really good. We strategised with the other teams before playing the matches. We had a lunch break and then we went back to playing the matches.

The other robots were really good especially with the shooting. Around the end of the competition, we went to a different arena and we did our coding and the driving skills. Then the competition ended and we listened as the judge called out the awards.

We didn’t win any but we did come 7th place in Ireland. We went home that day, very proud of ourselves. We stopped off for food on the way home. We arrived back in Birr around 7pm very tired but really happy with our day.

Many thanks to Ray Bell, Offaly County Council, for all his help. We would like to thank our teachers, Ms Grace, Ms Makim and Mr Cunningham for all the time and effort with Robotics this year.