Kings Robotics Club

Thanks to a very generous donation from the Friends of Berkhamsted, Year 10 pupils at the Girls School are hard at work in a weekly Robotics Club, building and programming a robot in preparation for the VEX Robotics competition 2023 – 24. The club is not only a great opportunity for pupils to work together and to gain valuable engineering and design skills, but it is a highly enjoyable and fun experience too.

The VEX Robotics Competition is a competition held year-round at local, regional, national and world level and sees over 11,500 teams from 40 countries competing in over 750 tournaments. The team at the Girls School will be taking part in the Over Under competition, in which they will be both competing against and collaborating with another school in order to win. Before that happens, though, there is plenty of hard work in store as they need to construct their robot and to program it using coding as well.

The pupils involved will have to show plenty of persistence and patience as this process will require much trial and error to get right. Along the way, they will also be developing their own skills and experiences. ‘I am really looking forwards to coding the robot and to improving my teamwork skills,’ explained Leah, who has recently joined the club.

Meanwhile, joining the club required pupils to complete an application form, demonstrating their interest in and commitment to the club. Amy, who has been part of the club since the beginning, explained that ‘I joined because I am really interested in robotics, coding and architecture and the club seemed like a great experience for the future. It has been really cool to build – I have enjoyed seeing it start in lots of little pieces and then the structure begin to come together as we have worked on it. The club has been great for teamwork skills as we have had to allocate roles and communicate with each other. We have also had to pay close attention to detail as we build the robot. People should get involved because the club is lots of fun and gives you good skills and experience.’