Harkaway Primary School students have taken on the world after flying to America for the 2019 VEX Robotics World Championship.
They joined 15,000 students from 40 countries in Kentucky for the competition where they designed and built a robot in a game-based engineering challenge.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” Declan said, one of the three member team.
“It is a real honour to represent Australia,” 12-year-old Hayden said.
“Yeah – and we’ve only been using a table tennis table instead of an actual competition field,” Tyler added.
The three grade six boys started their journey after the school was donated some money for helping at the Berwick show last year.
When given the choice, the students decided on a robot.
“I couldn’t believe how well they took to the building and coding elements,” school principal Leigh Johnson said.
“The beauty of this competition is that students from different schools (and countries) compete with each other – not against each other.
“They split the points earned and the team that has accumulated the most points is declared the teamwork winner.”
The Harkaway Kids must be a very friendly crew. Event after event, they kept on winning – including the Australian National Championships.
They were the only Victorian state primary school to get through to the Worlds.
The team performed impressively at the international level improving their world rankings significantly.
“We can’t wait to get back and start working on the next robot,” Tyler said.
