On 15 October this year, Hamilton House hosted a Robotics Competition between four Preparatory Schools in the region – Pridwin, The Ridge, Grayston, and Bryanston. This was the first of what we plan to be an annual event, inviting more schools to attend.

All of the planning was lead and designed by our Director of Robotics, Ms Zamantima Thela. The challenge pitted the four schools against one another on identical tracks that measured precision, accuracy and timing. Teamwork was a crucial aspect of the competition as each school needed to work in a team of 4 – this, no doubt, tested their skills of collaboration, their patience, and their resilience. It was fascinating to observe the different problem-solving techniques that each school used in exercising their methods through processes of trial-and-error, with one team deciding to use many robots, calibrating each one slightly differently, while another school perhaps deciding to focus on fewer robots and applying different sequences of code to them with each try.

The day was a great success with each school, whether completing the track or not, taking with them new experiences and lessons learned. Many teachers agreed that while the course was different to anything that their students had worked on before, it was a challenge that they knew would motivate their students to deepen their interest in robotics and to develop their coding skills even further.