We started a Robotics team last year to encourage the children’s interest in STEM, led by our brilliant teacher, Aaron Mackessy. Without hope or expectation, we entered the Laois VEX IQ Robotics Competition, for which teams of students are tasked with designing and building a robot to play with other teams in a game-based engineering challenge.

Having won the Laois competition, we made the journey to the All-Ireland Competition in Cork. The team faced some very stiff competition throughout the day but managed to hold their nerve and brought the gold home, scoring one of the highest scores seen in the country, even beating some secondary schools scores.

As All Ireland champions in the teamwork section and the first Primary School in Laois and Leinster to win the All Ireland, we have been invited to represent Ireland in the VEX World Championships in St Louis, Missouri from 28th-30th April. Our participation in this is dependent on us raising enough funds to travel to this competition, which is no easy feat for a 74 pupil school in rural Laois.

Any support or contribution that you could give to keep these young children’s dream alive would be so greatly appreciated. We need your help to ensure that the students of our school can fly the flag for Laois and Ireland on the world stage and to show our kids that anything is possible if they work hard and believe in themselves.