Mr. Hughes' Blog - Day 8

Day eight:

Fantastic news! Between the two teams of St Trininans and Rock ‘n’ Roar we have won 3 trophies!

St Trinians won the Secondary dance prize and a Superteams trophy; Rock ‘n’ Roar won a Superteams trophy. The trophies look spectacular and are made of heavy glass. There may be weight limit issues on the flight home.

The day began with a rather subdued group of youngsters getting up early to get to the venue by 9.00 a.m. to compete in the Superteams event. Expectations of success were low. In this part of the competition every team is put together with 2 other teams to create a choreographed dance routine based upon everyone’s robotic experience, expertise and hardware. The huge challenge was to blend everyone’s ideas through cooperation despite language and cultural barriers.

Rock ‘n’ Roar had been partnered with a German team who had used Bollywood as a theme for their performance and a Hong Kong Chinese team who had based their show on the Beijing Olympic mascots. Lily, Abbie and Emily were soon working enthusiastically with the different teams. St Trinians were partnered with another German team who had based their routine on a game of chess, and another Chinese team whose performance was based around an old magician’s trick of “find the lady”. International relations blossomed for one of our groups and they set to organising a combined PowerPoint presentation, dance routine for the group members and a robot dance including robots from all groups. In the other group communication and cooperation was not quite so easy. Nevertheless they did create a combined routine based on the theme of “a picnic in the park”. Bothe groups’ performances were strong enough to get them a Superteams trophy.

As by its very nature there is a subjective element to marking dance routines the way the competition works is to award trophies to the first 3 places in each competition. Effectively the top 3 teams become joint winners and each receives an award.

To be brief, we didn’t think that St Trinians had won. The first we knew about it was that there was a designated seat for one team member for the awards ceremony: we had won. Later we found out that we had won two Superteams trophies too. It was very exciting. The ceremony was great and lots of photos of the different groups were taken. There was a huge Chinese banquet which we all enjoyed.

On finishing we had to go back and pack up the robots in our 11 suitcases and then get them back to the hotel. There had been torrential rain, but this eased almost completely as we found 3 taxis quickly and returned to the hotel. Well done to both teams!