On Wednesday 3 July 2013 our GCSE engineering students spent the day learning about computer programming and robots.
The whole day was very hands-on with students learning and developing their programming skills through challenges set by Sam; our visiting expert for the day from Medway Education Business Partnership.
To some, the first tasks were all rather mysterious resulting in some confused and frustrated expressions. But the power of the team soon took over and everyone found themselves contributing to the design of the programs and construction of robot vehicles to tackle more and more challenging courses. It was amazing to see students with little or no programming experience build and program a robot capable of exploring a room without crashing or navigating around a table top without falling off the edge.

The afternoon brought the day's ultimate challenge; to adapt their vehicle and program it to follow a black line on a light coloured surface. This is a real test of robotics design and achieving a solution in a little over an hour is a tall order. Nevertheless our six teams took on the challenge. The results were again impressive with every team managing some degree of success and two teams producing vehicles that reliably navigated Sam's testing twisting circuit.
At the end of the afternoon, Otis Anderson, Robert Dew, Fred Hiscock, Joe Peskett and Josh Smith had made their robot navigate the course with an incredibly simple program. They won the day and progress to the county final to be held at BAE Systems in Rochester on Friday 12 July.