On Saturday 3rd March, St Anselm’s College’s brand new ‘First Tech Challenge’ team called “Virtual Memory” attended Calderstones for the North West Regional Tournament. Together they built a robot, but more importantly they learnt a diverse range of skills from Programming to Mechanical Engineering. At the event they reached the Alliance-final and were winners for the Think Award and also won the Alliance Award. Half of the awards at the event were enthusiastically presented by volunteers from ‘Make more than Robots’ and the Team were commended from the very start of the event for their enthusiasm and engagement.
At the Regional Final the Team narrowly lost out on a place at the First Tech Challenge National Championship but have gained a spot on the waiting list for the event at the University of Cambridge. The College Team has plans for outreach events next year with local primary schools to promote a love of STEM across a range of disciplines. The First Tech Challenge competition will be attempted by “Virtual Memory” in the new school year and they are excited to take on a new engineering challenge with their journey into the competition.
“Virtual Memory” have been hard at work every day preparing for the Regional Final Competition and will now refine their robot just in case a waiting list position becomes available for the National Final in June. The mottos of the competition are ‘More than Robots’ and ‘Gracious Professionalism’, which the group have truly embraced. They have communicated with teams across the country to share advice with them, have held Teams meetings with technology companies to practice their interview, wrote letters to companies to source sponsorship and have run enrichment sessions in College, to support teachers and younger students STEM skills. Next, they plan to run their very own STEM sessions for primary feeder schools.
St Anselm’s College aims to inspire our students to become confident leaders and good citizens at their core, and it is a delight to see these students fully embrace this philosophy. In the First Tech Challenge, “Virtual Memory” have shown that they are not just excellent students, but exceptional members of their community overall.
Congratulations and thank you to:
Y11 – John and Thomas
Y12 – Richard, Edward, Borys, Aaron, Max
Now onto the awards ceremony!
The team won the THINK Award, this judged award is given to the team that best reflects the journey the team took as they experienced the engineering design process during the build season. The engineering content within the portfolio is the key reference for judges to help identify the most deserving team. The team’s engineering content must focus on the design and build stage of the team’s robot.
And then they won Winning Alliance Award! This award was given to the winning Alliance represented in the final match. Their season finishes here, and they are now planning how they’re going to win the biggest award (the Inspire Award) next year! We couldn’t be more proud of them.
Mr B. Witherspoon – STEM Coordinator
