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I.T. Girls at Rangi Ruru Win Robotics Competition

Monday 24 August 2015, 10:13AM

By RedPR

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The Winning Rangi Ruru Team
The Winning Rangi Ruru Team Credit: Rangi Ruru Girls' School

CHRISTCHURCH

In their first outing against hundreds of other students from around Canterbury, Rangi Ruru Girls’ School has won two categories at the regional RoboCup Junior New Zealand competition.

Two teams of Year 9 and 10 students from Rangi Ruru competed in the senior Soccer and Theatre sections of the Christchurch regional event at CPIT.

In the Soccer category, team members Abby Croot, Eugene In and Yang Kun Xiang designed and programmed two robots to compete against an opposing pair of robots. Kicking an infra-red transmitting ball into their designated goal, the team scored the greatest number of goals to win a hard-fought battle.

Suzanna Davis, Charlotte Smillie and Alisha Bedggood won the Theatre category. In this category, the girls programmed robots to music and are encouraged to give their robots real personality. The girls’ winning performance saw the robot get down and boogie to the song “Today Is Gonna Be A Great Day” by Phineas and Ferb.

Commenting on Ministry of Education data out last week which showed that proportionately, fewer girls than boys enter the IT sector despite outperforming boys at every NCEA level, Rangi Ruru School Principal Julie Moor says, historically IT has certainly been a very male dominated area both at school level and beyond, but increasingly girls are enthusiastically and very capably embracing all aspects of IT and in particular robotics and coding.

 

“As a school we have to make sure that we can meet the needs of, and indeed stretch, these capable and tech savvy young women. At the graduate end some of our old girls have been employed by companies such as Google and it’s great to see females increasingly entering this career space,” adds Ms Moor.

 

Rangi Ruru teaches coding and gaming to all Years 9 and 10 students as part of the Digital Technology classes. The school also runs an after school creative technology programme which is open to all students. This focuses of this programme is on interactive hands-on creativity with electronics using an Arduino learning kit.

Technology Faculty Head, Ross Widdup says the result is very pleasing given it is the first year the school has entered the competition.

“The competition allows the girls to put to the test not only their engineering and IT skills, but also encourages organistional skills, creative thinking and teamwork,” said Mr Widdup.

The competition is run in over 30 countries around the world and is now a regular feature of the annual university RoboCup World Finals. The Rangi Ruru team now look forward to the national finals in September and the winner from that will head to the world competition to represent New Zealand.

ENDS