Tahuna's Robotics Team Awarded Spot at New Zealand Nationals

Tahuna prepared a FIRST LEGO League robotics team to represent Dunedin at the South Island Regional competition in Christchurch on 8th November. Their outstanding performance earned them a spot at the New Zealand FIRST Robotics National Robotics Championship.

FIRST is a global robotics community that prepares students for the future. FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a section of the FIRST program that teaches students STEM and real-world problem-solving skills through hands-on learning (https://www.firstinspires.org/). FLL teams build robots to compete for points on a themed LEGO obstacle course. Teams also create an Innovation Project

(https://www.firstinspires.org/), which is a creative, often robotics-based, solution to a problem they find related to the theme of the year. This years FIRST Robotics theme is the ocean, so all FLL teams created an Innovation Project to address a marine-based problem. The Tahuna One FLL team anchored their Innovation Project on the schools ongoing Tomahawk Lagoon ECOTAGO water testing project. Since 2012, Dunedin students, including Tahuna Intermediate students, have measured the Ph, turbidity, macroinvertebrates, salinity, and other metrics to keep an eye on the health of the ecosystem. The Tahuna One FLL team designed a solution to the difficulty of testing far out into a body of water. Their solution is a robot with a robotic arm and sampling device that could autonomously sample and record data anywhere in the Tomahawk Lagoon. The robot could run for a whole day, with solar panels on top to generate electricity.

The team also designed and programmed a high-performing robot that accomplished many tasks on this years LEGO obstacle course. Last weekend, the team drove to Christchurch to compete in the regional competition and won second place out of thirty-one teams in the robot game aspect of the competition. The teams experience at the competition was a valuable learning process, and they are enthusiastically preparing for the National Championship on November 30th. For more information, or if you would like to sponsor the team to compete at the FLL NZ National Championship in Auckland, please contact Harrison Tinger atharrisontinger@gmail.com