Junior School coders conquer the CrumbleBot Challenge!
This week, we were delighted to hold our first ever ‘Year 5 CrumbleBot Challenge Day’. The girls worked in collaborative teams in a scaled-down in-school version of the ‘RoboCupJunior UK National Primary Championships', but using an even greater variety of coding skills to program their CrumbleBot robots.
RoboCupJunior is an international organisation that runs national and international coding and robotics competitions in a variety of age categories and leagues. Face-to-face competitions have been on hold for several years but, prior to this, teams from St. Mary’s Junior School have had great success at both national and international levels.
Most recently, in 2019, our Year 5 Team were crowned ‘RoboCupJunior UK National Primary Line Tracking Champions‘, our Year 6 Team were crowned ‘RoboCupJunior UK National Primary Rescue Simulation Champions’ and four of our Year 6 girls were ‘RoboCupJunior Euro 2019 Rescue Simulation Quarter Finalists’ in the U19 Category in Hannover, Germany. We hope to be able to report back on future successes, as soon as these competitions resume.
The ‘Year 5 CrumbleBot Challenge Day’ was led by Mr. Severy, our Computer Science Coordinator, with the girls participating in a series of challenges against the clock, using monochrome, ultrasonic and light sensors to enable their CrumbleBots to navigate autonomously around a variety of different environments. They had a strict time limit of 15 minutes for each challenge, but were allowed as many practice runs as they needed during that time, to allow them to adjust their code and get the fastest time possible. However, there was a 5-second penalty every time their robot left the course or crashed into an obstacle, so the girls quickly discovered that accuracy could be more important than overall speed, as the penalties soon added up! The times (and penalties) for their fastest runs on each challenge were added together and the team with the quickest overall time were declared the champions.
Certificates were awarded to the Class and Overall Year 5 Champions, as well as for the ‘Fastest Individual Challenge Time’ for each challenge, and for the ‘Best Teamwork’. Special congratulations to team 'Magic Squad' (Evie S., Georgie W. and Sarah-Rose Q.), who were crowned 'St. Mary's Junior School Year 5 CrumbleBot Challenge Champions 2023' with an overall time just two seconds quicker than that of the second place team!
We would like to congratulate all of our Junior School girls for their determination, perseverance, sporting attitude and enthusiasm throughout a very intense, but enjoyable and highly productive day.
Find out more about Computer Science at St Mary's Junior School