Key Stage 4
Advanced Robot Racer
Luke Ellison
It was an early start and everyone was a little worried. We had only been working on the buggy for a week and we had not quite finished it, so we knew there would be work to do once we got there. It wasn’t a lot that we had to do, we simply needed to attach the ball launcher to the top of the buggy which would not take long we just had not tested it yet.
We had a few hours before our competition so we had plenty of time to do this. Once we had attached it we struck a problem; the ball launcher was so heavy that the buggy could not move under its weight. We spent ages trying to fix this problem but it just did not seem possible. Then in the half an hour lunch break we came up with an idea. We had to quickly make a new lighter ball launcher. We threw aside our old heavy one and made a lightweight plastic catapult. This solved the problem so we were back in the competition.
When we set it down on the track there were some hitches in that it didn’t actually do everything as we had planned but seen as though we managed to get down the track and back regardless of our time we managed to get 2nd place, which was a victory for us considering the stressful lunch break beforehand.
