On Tuesday 11^th July a group of children, staff and parents from Anlaby Acre Heads Primary School travelled down to Legoland in Windsor to take part in the first national Lego Mindstorms Robot competition, the Cyber Challenge 2000, organised by the University of Reading Cybernetics Department.

Schools across the United Kingdom were invited to take part and Anlaby Acre Heads was the only school in this area to compete.

The challenge was to build and programme a robot which could get around an obstacle course without any help. The team’s robot, (called Mallack Y2K, from the initials of the team’s first names), was programmed to go around the course using touch sensors to decide when it should turn. It was carefully built for speed, power and strength by the children, who did all the work as an after school project.

The competition was fierce, but Mallack Y2K and the team did very well, with the children quickly reprogramming and rebuilding the robot to cope with the course and the other robots. Although the robot didn’t manage to beat off the opposition in the time and course trials it did win the prestigious first place for design, which was quite an achievement because up until a month ago the team had very little idea about how to build and programme the robot.

The school hopes to use the Lego Mindstorms kit and software for future curriculum projects, building robots to perform other tasks and writing programs to help learn about computing.