A Tauranga team have won the elementary school division of the national robotics competition and qualified for next year’s VEX IQ World Championships in the United States.

Tauranga brothers Damian Walder, 12, and Jeremy Walder, 10, beat 33 teams from throughout New Zealand when teamed up with a Manawatū team, College Street Normal School, in a two-day tournament in Palmerston North on December 7-8.

“They’ve worked every week on their robot since this year’s game was released in May,” STEAM-ED general manager Toni de Rijk said. “In fact, this team pulled apart their robot about two months ago because it was a bit glitchy and unreliable and started all over again, but they ended up with a better robot.”

In the game, their robot needed to pick up balls and fire them into goals at various heights in a game that lasted a minute. They also had to pass the balls from one robot to another.

“Accuracy and consistency were important,” de Rijk said.

This year was Damian and Jeremy’s second time competing at a national level. They worked together to design, build and code, and were each responsible for driving during the games against other teams.

“The hardest part was coding the autonomous driving,” said Damian, a Year 7 student at Otūmoetai Intermediate, referring to the one minute that robots are programmed to perform tasks alone. “It wasn’t doing what we wanted it to for a while and it was getting really painful.”

“We took it apart because it was really heavy and slow around the game field,” said Jeremy, a Year 6 Bellevue School student.

“The boys had put in a lot of extremely hard work at STEAM-ED and using their own robotics kit at home,” said de Rijk. “They also created an amazingly thorough 103-page engineering notebook that documented their process which won them the design award.”

STEAM-ED had 15 students with five robots competing at nationals. Damian and Jeremy now head to the VEX IQ World Championships in Dallas, Texas, from May 12-14.