DEMM Engineering & Manufacturing
The future in their very capable hands
TWO TEAMS of Year 8, 9 and 10 children from St Peter’s College in Palmerston North went to the WorldSkills Australia VEX IQ robotics championships in Sydney last month and showed that there is every chance that New Zealand might one day be a world leader in robotics.
Anna Skiffington and Charlie Mollard won five of six rounds to come home as champions. Even better for the future of robotics in New Zealand, the round the duo lost was won by Denz Shinoy and Reuben Mascarenhas, St Peter’s other competing team.
Their task at the competition was, over three days, to build – from a provided box of robotic bits and pieces – a robot and then programme it so it could compete in a ball dexterity event. For this the robots had to pick up balls and move them to the other side of the robot arena to score a point. Each ball-moving round lasted 45 seconds within which as many balls as possible had to be shifted.
Skiffington and Mollard’s winning robot will be used by WorldSkills as a demonstration model and in return the team will get a new super-kit to replace the missing parts.
WorldSkills International, formerly known as the International Vocation Training Organisation (IVTO), was founded in the 1940s and emerged from a desire to create new employment opportunities for young people in some of the economies that were devastated by the Second World War. The organisation currently has 79 member countries and regions, most of which organise national skills competitions that help to prepare the workforce and talent of today for the jobs of the future.
Governed by an international Board of Directors and administered by the WorldSkills Secretariat, WSI’s the organisation’s purpose is ‘to encourage vocational education and training, to shift perceptions and create the understanding that to learn a skill and choose a skill- based career, is one of the most important decisions a young person and their family will ever make’.
Any engineers who would like to encourage the next generation by being a judge at the 2018 New Zealand VIQC National Championships on 8 December in Palmerston North, please contact Stephan van Haren HOD Digital Technology, Electronics and Robotics at St Peter’s College. vanharens@stpeterspn.school.nz