Building A Robot Racer
Simon Crowther
On the afternoon of Tuesday 3rd of June, our task as part of the Young Engineers group, was to help a few of the Junior School boys with their key stage 2 buggies. These buggies would have to be able to fire a ball, drop a coin and reverse upon hitting a wall. We were going to be using the Kre8 kit.
During the weeks leading up to the activity afternoon, I took a buggy home and started building one. I soon realised the tasks set were going to be difficult to overcome, but not impossible. I quickly became hooked and spent my evening building, modifying and tuning it. I had it reversing, firing a ball and traveling quickly down a straight line.
The buggies we were going to help the Junior School build would have to compete in a competition at Nottingham Trent University. As I am competitive, I knew we would have to work hard producing a winning buggy.
The afternoon was a great success, all the Junior School boys enjoyed it, and it would be a lie to say I didn’t. I had Sam Wheelhouse helping me with the Junior School boys, and after a short while they were beginning to show their aptitude in D.T. We were able to show them our buggies and our solutions to the challenges. By the end of the day we had all the buggies working and every buggy overcame at least one of the challenges.
I was impressed with the quality of their work and would be shocked if they didn’t put other buggies in the competition to shame. The competition takes place in late June and the boys are working frantically to prove their buggy is the best. Good luck to them.
Building a Robot Racer
Campbell Minogue
Ten boys from year 6 met in the Senior School Design Technology Labs where we were told what to do. After that Mr Gray gave us a demonstration, following on from that we were presented with a kit and some handy tips on building our robots.
We started to build the chassis and added the axles and wheels. After this we fixed on the motor and battery holder. Luckily one of the year 9 Young Engineers helped us to make a latching switch, which makes the motor go forward and backwards.
Towards the end of the session we built a roll cage that would also act as part of our catapult. Out of the day, I learnt a lot and thoroughly enjoyed it.
This would lead to a day out to Nottingham Trent University that would put our buggies through their paces; in a competition that would lead to the best buggy being crowned “champion!”
Building a Robot Racer
Max Bowling
On Tuesday 3rd June, ten Year 6 pupils came over to the Design and Technology block to build some robot racers. These robot racers are hopefully going to be entered in a competition run by Nottingham Trent University. To win this event, the models will have to do several things, including: dropping a coin in a selected area, firing a table-tennis over a post and managing to reverse backwards after touching a wall. All of this had to be done in the quickest time possible.
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After a normal morning of lessons, a selected number of boys came over at 12:00 to design and build their robot racers. As we arrived, we were shown some examples that members of the Senior School had made. Fortunately, the University had lent us the track so we had a rough idea of what we needed to achieve. To build the robot racers, we were given a special kit. For an hour and a half, we started to build our models and when we stopped for lunch they were developing well. We had a quick lunch and went back to continue our work on the racers.
Shortly afterwards we had managed to get all of the models working and we started to incorporate the special attributes. One group included the reversing mechanism, another group worked on firing the table-tennis ball and the last group developed the coin-dropping device.
Unfortunately, our time was coming to an end and we had to stop working. Since we had not quite finished the models we had to organise other times when we could continue our work. All of us had a really good time and are hoping that we can finish the racers in time for the competition.
