By Luke Voogt
A group of young robot specialists is preparing to take on the Asia Pacific after First Lego League organisers announced a tournament in July.
Connor Wood, 14, is part of the Geelong Lutheran College team that won an interstate competition online late last year.
“I was honestly really surprised,” the grade 9 student from Batesford recalled.
“They had a live stream on YouTube where they went through all the different awards.
“We hadn’t been given an award, so we thought maybe we might be a chance for the overall trophy.
“Then they announced it was us and everyone started screaming and cheering because it was such a big achievement for us to win the competition.”
Like that tournament, which featured teams from South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, the Asia Pacific tournament will be a virtual event.
Connor has taken part in multiple similar events after watching previous robotics teams at the college prompted him to join.
“I guess that got me interested in how the robots go,” he said.
“I really enjoy the programming. We’ve got to program them to do set challenges on table and it’s a lot of fun.
“You’ve got make sure all the turns and degrees of rotation are right.
“It’s always a lot of fun to compete in the events and hear what the judges think about our project and our robot.
“Obviously, we put a lot of work into this. We had some slight problems in the parts of our robots [last tournament] so we have worked on those issues.”
Organisers recently announced that the event would take place online from July 23 to 25.
