Mullion Creek robot rodeo rides to victory
Mullion Creek Primary may be a small village school, but they are a big presence on the national RoboCup stage.
Over the recent school holidays, the Year 6 Performance team took out the National RoboCup Championship in Melbourne.
RoboCup pits teams of school students and their programming skills against each other in a number of different disciplines.
In Performance, the teams must choreograph a dance routine with their robots and are judged on their performance, the journal outlining their work and an interview.
“RoboCup is an amazing thing to get involved in,” said teacher Sharon Cloete. “You have to experience it, there are just rooms and rooms full of children, all sitting at their computers, all coding their own robot and then going to test it against others and it is just wonderful to see how much they learn from each other.
“In Performance, they have to think of a scenario, like a story or a dance drama and they have to choose music to go with that and they've got to sort out what their robots are going to wear, what they are going to wear and then they've got to choreograph a dance to go with that, not just for the robots”, but for themselves as well. It is really an amazing thing!”
After winning the State competition in Canberra earlier this year, Sharon took their students to the national competition in Canberra held over the weekend of October 11-13.
The winning Mullion Creek team of Katelyn Peters, Madison Brooking, Ellie Calleja and Anna Martin were the only Primary School team in the Experiences Performance division.
Their performance, a rodeo scene, feature two robot horse riders, a rodeo clown and bull ride.
“They had a bull, which they 3D printed — that they designed themselves — to make it be able to buck. They had sensors onto the bull so that when the gate opens the bull rushes out… All the robots were depending on each other and reacting with each other to set off the next reaction,” said Sharon.
Mullion Creek students do robotics from kindergarten right through to Year Six,” said Sharon, who is enthusiastic about the skills it develops in their students.
“Robotics is the future. I mean if you look at any vocation out there, any job out there, they are all using robots nowadays whether it is the defence force, whether it is in medicine, whether it is in agriculture — people are using robots,” she said.
“It gets the children to think diversely, to think creatively and to think outside the square and the earlier children learn to code, that are involved in robotics… I think we're setting them up with life skills really.”