Connect Award Winner — Team Snapwire

About the team

Team Snapwire is a group of 8 pupils in Year 8 at Perton Middle School. Our team is successful because we thrive on teamwork and we support each other in any way possible. We have always been upbeat even in the most perplexing times such as Coronavirus. Individually, our team all contributes not only their knowledge but their drive for helping others when they are in need. ‘Snappy’ AKA our robot has performed to its best standards and in some parts has exceeded our expectations (that is with the help of everybody in the team). Support wise our teacher has been wonderful cheering us on and genuinely being there to support our technical needs.

How we worked together

All of us played a big part in helping the building, coding and promoting the robot. We had a great mentor called Tony who taught us how to build the different parts of ‘Snappy’; we will always be grateful for him giving up his time. Adapting became our coders’ second nature, they always developed and improved our robot’s code to give us the best chance of success in the autonomous stage. The coders we have were incredible at getting on with the job in hand much like our builders who with Tony’s help created a moving crane, an open and closing grabber/claw and a ring thrower complete with an adjustable height. We haven’t had any arguments which shows our utmost admiration for each other and our teacher. The skills we developed were: patience, more advanced block coding, building, common sense and quick learning. All in all, our team gets on with each other and most of all we support each other like friends should do.

Significant challenges

During the build-up of the competition, we have mainly suffered from one huge hindrance: Covid-19. It had previously prevented us from meeting up after school on Wednesdays, which was originally our allocated time slot (1 hour) and therefore, we couldn’t develop ‘Snappy’ our robot. To get around this inconvenience, we took time off in lessons during regular school hours to work on it. Our coders created and improved the autonomous and manual scripts in computing lessons, our social media team linked our group to the internet and our builders developed and improved the design and functionality of the robot.

Victory

Much to our joy, we were called out of lesson one Friday morning with high spirits as we were to receive some important news. We had finished top in the regional competition! Our team was ecstatic with excitement as we heard the news. Our enthusiasm was only boosted when we learnt that we had been awarded the “Connect” award for our media team’s strong performance. We feel gratitude to both our teacher, mentor and FIRST Tech Challenge UK.

What’s next?

We have enjoyed our time during FIRST Tech Challenge UK and have learnt a lot from it. Next year, we plan to further refine our skills as a group and potentially look at setting up a team at our new school. We could also return to Perton Middle after school to work with Year 7 and help teach some basic coding and building skills or even participate with them. All in all, we feel that there will be plenty of opportunities in the future when we can use the skills we have developed here, both in school and in our future careers. Thank you FIRST UK!