Help Robotics Team Great Britain get to Panama

Powercut Robotics is a team comprising six 16 year old students from Langley Park School for Boys in Beckenham, London, and are currently ranked the best robotics team in the country. Every year, we compete in the First Tech Challenge, the world’s largest student robotics competition.

We aim to inspire a lasting legacy for robotics, not only in our school, but in our region. This is why we are a ‘Champion Organisation’ – one of the few schools in the country responsible for hosting events, starting new teams at other schools, and assisting over a dozen local schools in their competition efforts.

We are a very small team of only six members. Despite this, our team did unprecedentedly well in the UK finals at the end of June, placing #1 in the entire competition and earning the UK high score for points scored in a match. We also won the prestigious ‘Inspire Award’. This award is the largest one and is given to the team who is a contender for every other award (not just mechanical but also outreach and community work). We are the first team in the history of the UK competition to win both the entire competition and the Inspire Award - we were all incredibly proud.

These achievements are unprecedented for a second year team, however, our team was most excited by the news we received after winning the Inspire Award - our team is to be the sole representative of Great Britain in the First Global Challenge. Known as the ‘Robotics Olympics’, 190 countries each send five students to compete - this year’s competition is in Panama City in October. It is still surreal to us that five state school students from Beckenham will make up the entirety of Team Great Britain for this giant event (you can find more information at https://first.global/about/).

The week after the UK competition, the team travelled to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, to compete in the European finals. Despite being up against some of the highest ranked teams in the world, from as far away as the USA and China, we placed eighth out of 50 teams in our division – the highest a UK team had ever placed before. We were also the first comprehensive school from the UK to have the opportunity to compete in robotics internationally.

Our robot is one of the most advanced in the country, being nearly entirely made from custom parts and employing advanced control systems, using a variety of sensors. You can read more about it in detail on our website: https://powercut-robotics.org/ (scroll down to the ‘engineering portfolio’ PDF).

Overall in the last 2 years, we have won four regional awards, and seven national awards.