By Jessica Anstice
Harkaway Primary School students will be heading over to America to represent Australia at a global robotics event in April this year.
The school bought a VEX IQ Robot using a VEX IQ grant and $500 the students’ earnt by volunteering at the Berwick Show earlier last year.
VEX IQ is a plastic snap together construction system tailored for primary and middle school students to encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) learning.
From there, the schools VEX IQ Robotics Team used an old table tennis table to practice on.
Throughout the year, the team of students were competing and winning against much older, secondary school students.
After competing in Australia’s signature robotics event held at the Convention Centre in Melbourne, students from Harkaway Primary School were selected to compete at the National Championships in Kentucky.
Over the two days, they were competing with schools from all around Australia and were among the youngest competitors there.
In fact, we were the only state primary school at the event. Their section of the competition had more than 20 teams.
“This is a significant achievement given that we only started this year, had no way near the resourcing most other schools had, and we were up against mostly secondary school teams,” Harkaway Primary School principal Leigh Johnson said.
“Ultimately, it is not about the technology, it is all about people working together to problem solve and create unique solutions that help shape their world.”
