‘Robo Roos’ Hopping Into Engineering with Don Alan

The Robo Roos, a local Adelaide robotics team made of students, have designed and built a robot that recently competed at the 2012 national FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) event, held in Sydney. The Robo Roos are the first and only South Australian team to be involved in FRC, and are able to experience the ‘real’ world of engineering.

Thanks to FIRST, the Robo Roos are inspiring the next generation of engineers. Now, they are looking at competing in their next challenge, thanks to generous sponsorship, including Don Alan.

On Sunday 6^th January 2013 the FIRST kick-off event was held in Sydney. This introduced the ‘Ultimate Ascent’ challenge to local SA team Robo Roos.

Never heard of FIRST? It’s an American organisation backed by sponsors like NASA that promotes Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. It gets high school students involved by having a competition to design, build and program a robot to compete with an alliance of 2 other robots against the opposition. Every year the challenge is new. Click here to see this year’s challenge.

Team captain, Mila, said “Kick-off was 2am Sydney time but that didn’t stop us starting our team planning and strategising immediately. We only had 6 weeks to get this robot built and shipped off to Hawaii to compete”.

Lead mentor Robert Zibell commented that “the kids come up with fantastic ideas, we just have to guide them with the process of getting from concept stage to finished product. They will learn design, fabrication, programming and teamwork. But most importantly they’ll have fun!”

“We have put a team together with students from 7 local schools. Our team couldn’t compete without the generous sponsorship from companies like Don Alan” said media captain Bridget.

“We’re glad to have the opportunity to be one of the sponsors of the Robo Roos. Year after year our whole industry struggles to find engineering talent. We know the only real long term solution is to promote engineering to students at high school level and thanks to the Robo Roos and the First Robotics Competition we can contribute to that.” said Donald Kay of Don Alan Pty Ltd.