After months of early-morning practice sessions and more than a few late-night redesigns, Greenfield's Secondary Robotics Team returned from this year's Inter-Schools Robotics Challenge with the regional championship trophy — beating out 24 competing schools.
The Competition
The Regional Robotics Challenge tasks teams with designing an autonomous robot capable of completing a series of timed obstacle and sorting tasks. Teams are judged on both performance and the clarity of their engineering documentation — meaning the win reflects as much careful planning as it does raw mechanical skill.
Greenfield's robot completed the obstacle course with the fastest average time of the day, while also scoring highest among all entries on the judges' design review.
Building the Robot
The team began designing their entry at the start of the school year, using our Innovation Centre's makerspace for prototyping and 3D printing. Several early designs were scrapped entirely after failing early testing — a process the team's coach, Mr. Emeka Nwosu, says was just as valuable as the final win.
"The students learned more from the versions that didn't work than the one that did," Nwosu said. "That's really the whole point of the exercise."
Meet the Team
This year's championship team included six Secondary students spanning Junior and Senior Secondary, working across mechanical design, programming, and competition strategy roles. Several team members plan to pursue engineering or computer science at university, citing the robotics programme as a formative experience.
What's Next
The team now advances to the National Robotics Championship later this year. In the meantime, they'll be running introductory robotics workshops for interested Primary students — part of Greenfield's effort to build STEM interest from an early age.
