Parklands College Robotics Team has scooped the national competition that grants them entry to the First Lego League (FLL), a global robotics competition.
The competition had “Animal Allies” as its theme. Teams from around the world explored relationships between human beings and animals.
Parklands College teams, Hyperion Bots and Eureka, researched their favourite topics, devised their solution and worked on the Robot Game Challenge to complete their preparation for the Western Cape regional competition held at the Cape Town Science Centre on November 5 last year and they were placed first and second respectively.
Teams Hyperion Bots and Eureka were then invited to take part in the First Lego League Nationals in Johannesburg at the Sci-Bono Centre from December 2 and December 3 last year, together with 27 other regional qualifying teams.
Team Eureka focused on controlling the spread of highly dangerous diseases through the large-scale monitoring of bat migrations, pinpointing the straw-coloured fruit bat through their bat box design; while Team Hyperion Bots focused on massively reducing the damage to horses’ nerve, bone and cranial structure caused by the use of horse bits by jockeys, while still retaining their effectiveness by redesigning the bit using a more efficient material.
Team Eureka won the Project Research Award and Team Hyperion Bots impressed the judges in all its presentations and was an overall favourite in the competition and was crowned the South African champion in the FLL National 2016 competition out of 233 teams that had registered from eight South African provinces as well as a team from Swaziland.
This was the first time a Western Cape team won the South African competition.
Team Hyperion Bots will now go on to represent South Africa in the World Festival First Lego League International Competition from Wednesday April 19 to Saturday April 22 in Houston, Texas.
