Hawke's Bay students Ella White, Mary-Jane Richards, Jimmy August and Ruby Langford will represent New Zealand at the First Global Challenge in Geneva Switzerland in October 2022. Hawke's Bay Today reporter James Pocock chats to the creators.
A squad of techie teens from Hawke's Bay will represent New Zealand and take on the world in the Olympics of robotics.
Jimmy August (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui), Ella White (Te Ātiawa), Ruby Langford from Havelock North High School and Mary-Jane Richards (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) from Karamu High School have been selected to represent New Zealand as the Blackbots at the FIRST Global Challenge.
The event, which takes place in Geneva, Switzerland, on October 13 to 16, is an international robotics challenge for youth that involves teams from over 180 countries.
The four secondary school students have developed their skills through coding, building and piloting Lego robots through primary or intermediate school.
This competition represents the next tier with a completely new type of robot and coding.
August has already had success internationally as a member of the Blackbots team that came second at the 2019 FIRST Lego competition in the USA.
Richards was a member of a Hawke's Bay team that were 2020 National FIRST Lego champions and was set to travel to Texas with the Blackbots before pandemic travel restrictions hit.
White and Langford have slightly less experience but have competed at a high level before in other sporting codes.
Langford said she had robotics as a subject in intermediate.
"I thoroughly enjoyed that. I got the opportunity to do the FIRST tech challenge and I thought why not get on board and give it a go."
White said the new experience has been fun.
"It's definitely a lot of new information but just getting stuck into it from the get go has been fun," White said.
The four Hawke's Bay teens preparing to represent New Zealand at the FIRST Global Challenge from left to right- Ella White, Mary-Jane Richards, Jimmy August, Ruby Langford. Photo / Paul Taylor
Teams at the FIRST Global Challenge are supplied with a standard kit of parts to design and assemble and code a robot from scratch to complete tasks in a themed game based on real challenges faced by global governments.
In past games, alliances have worked to move and manipulate objects in different games on uniquely designed playing fields that change each year.
The teams don't know what they will get in the kit or what the challenge this year will be until closer to the date of the event.
FIRST team liaison Ricardo Fox said Hawke's Bay youth have taken to robotics the best out of all New Zealand regions and have dominated domestically.
"The primary schools have built it up and now we are trying to get the secondary schools involved," Fox said.
FIRST New Zealand representative and team mentor Brendon White said the competition has collaboration as a core value and students that weren't selected to represent New Zealand have still worked with the team of four and contributed.
