Year 6 race robots in the Micro:bit Coding Challenge

In the inaugural 'Micro:bit Coding Challenge', held this week at 'The Centre For Computing History' here in Cambridge, our Junior School girls programmed robot buggies to race against robot entries from schools across Cambridgeshire.

The competition, organised by Cambridge Rotary, involved using a micro:bit (a tiny pocket-sized computer) to control a robot buggy, through two challenges at progressive difficulty levels, followed by a racetrack final. The buggy kit came with built-in sensors for line and obstacle sensing and the coding was carried out on a Raspberry Pi, before being transferred to a micro:bit slotted into the buggy.

Our Year 6 students used the block coding interface of the micro:bit to code the buggy to investigate the obstacles and lines around it, before navigating their buggies around a final track. The focus of the day was on how the participants used their problem-solving skills to complete the challenges.

The competition was contested by 13 teams from other Cambridgeshire schools. Many congratulations to our team, Anthea E., Anati L., Molly S., and Grace W., whose buggy completed the entire course with no penalties, and in a time that was just four seconds slower overall than the winning team’s buggy.

Our girls were praised by the organisers for: