A team of London schoolgirls have scooped four prizes at the national VEX IQ challenge, thanks to mentoring from Goldsmiths Computing.

The Cyborgs – four Year 9 girls from Henrietta Barnett School – competed in the VEX IQ challenge to design and build a robot.

Early in the process of constructing the robot, one of the girls – Elli Gaver – came to Goldsmiths and talked with post-doc researcher Perla Maiolino. Perla helped Elli figure out how to make the basic design she wanted. This was a great foundation for later improvements – and by the time Nationals came along, the entire robot had been made and remade several times over.

After qualifying at the regionals in London, the Cyborgs travelled to Birmingham to compete against 40 of the top UK teams who had qualified at their regional competitions. The Cyborgs ended up winning four of the ten top prizes:

• Excellence Award for the best robot in the competition
• Teamwork Challenge, for amassing the highest total of points in a series of trials that involved being paired randomly with other teams to cooperatively try to clear a field of balls
• Driver Skills, in which they got the highest number of points driving alone in the same ball-clearing challenge
• Programming Skills for programming their robot to autonomously do the same task

The girls are now busily improving their robots’ hardware and software in preparation for their trip to Louisville Kentucky to compete in the Internationals on 20 April – 23 April 2016.

Goldsmiths Computing have contributed to the team’s travel expenses – and we wish them the very best luck!