“I feel the need – the need for speed.”
It’s not fighter jets taking flight at Marsden State High School, but robots crafted by senior students competing for glory.
For the past three years, budding engineers from the school have participated in the VEX Robotics Challenge, which this year saw teams from all over south-east Queensland and even Cairns battle it out at Marsden.
Each year, the Marsden team’s robots have taken on the iconic names from Top Gun – Iceman, Viper, and now Cougar.
And like in the famous movie, the stakes are always high.
For school captain and aspiring mechanical engineer Dustin McGuire, this was his final chance to qualify for the national championship, this year to be held in Adelaide.
The competition’s several challenges change every year. This season, students had to build robots capable of picking up small, 20-sided foam blocks and scoring them into elevated perspex tubes across a six-foot playing field.
“You can build a robot up to 18 inches cubed,” Mr McGuire said.
“It has to be able to drive, pick up the blocks and deposit them at different heights. Our robot had a big conveyor in the middle with rubber wheels that would spin to grip the blocks and then shoot them up a conveyor into the tubes.
“We could shoot them about two metres in the air – which wasn’t quite what we were aiming to do.”
Each team works on its robot for months before competition day.
This year, the Marsden team just missed out on qualifying for nationals.
But Mr McGuire was able to easily shake it off – mainly because of his love for the sport.
“We were only two points away, which is awesome for us to look back on,” he said.
“You have to document your design process – what worked, what didn’t, what you could improve – with photos and diagrams. It really emphasises the learning.
“Something is going to go wrong And that happens to every team. Some of our main systems fell apart in our warm up game, so we rushed to get that fixed for the first match and heaps of stuff like that.
“It’s always an awesome challenge.”
Despite not qualifying for nationals, Marsden didn’t go home empty-handed.
“Marsden was fortunate enough to win the Sportsmanship Award this year,” Mr McGuire said.
“That’s judged by the Griffith Uni VEX team, who referee the state competition. It’s about who really embodies what it means to be a competitive engineering student – high-fiving the opposition, helping to reset the field, keeping things running smoothly.”
