As 2019 drew to a close, the STEM room at St Catherine’s School was abuzz with action as a trio of highly committed and dedicated girls and Dash, a blue robot with a cheeky sense of humour, entered the 2019/20 Wonder Workshop Wonder League Robotics Competition.
Competing alongside 8,400 students from 90 countries they worked together to program the adventurous Dash through a range of obstacles, from navigating their way through a labyrinth to building a pulling system to open gates to the Lost Realm.
This engaging learning task saw the team develop life skills that transcended both the competition and classroom.
Over three long days the St Catherine’s team wrote lines of code, filmed hours of video, and used metres of hot glue, but most importantly they were met with difficulty on multiple occasions.
“At times, they failed spectacularly,” teacher Alyssa Flint said.
“Despite their best attempts Dash crashed, he fell… several times off a bridge. But it was in this failure that the team learnt much more about the school’s values of perseverance.”
As Einstein said, “it’s not that I am so smart, it is just that I stay with problems longer” and in this coding experience the girls were forced to try numerous solutions.
They had to rethink and adjust in order to find success.
“It was hard and there were times when they wanted to give up, however, they didn’t,” Ms Flint said.
Perseverance is often considered a natural by-product of coding because things often don’t go to plan and one must apply effective communication and problem-solving skills to forge ahead, she said.
But it is through the fun and engaging environment that allows students to foster positive connections in real life situations that allows students to develop the essential value of perseverance in a meaningful way.
Throughout the competition students demonstrated that with perseverance, even in the toughest of times, they could find success.
As students move forward in their development this underpinning value of perseverance will benefit them all both in out of the classroom.
They learnt that if at first you do not succeed, do not give up, rather, try and try again.
In the case of this story it is the hard work and dedication that saw this team, one of over 4,500 make it to the invitational round.
“ While there were more mistakes, slip ups and failures, they persevered and get to do it all over again, building skills that they will continue to use throughout their lives,” she said.
