Taranaki students win middle-school division at Robotics World Championships in the USA

An all-girl robotics team from Taranaki has been crowned world champions. 

New Plymouth’s Tara Stevens, 14, and Okato’s Riley Pollard, 11, fought off around 80 others from 24 countries to take out their division at the VEX IQ Robotics World Championships in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. .    

Not only did they win their middle school (years 6-8) division but they also went on to compete and place 6th in the world across all 400 teams in the wider competition, in front of 20,000 spectators.

The competition involves building a robot to compete in a game designed by VEX IQ. 

This year’s game involved moving and stacking plastic objects called hubs, hanging the robot from a bar and working together with another team (selected at random), all in a 60 second time limit. 

Robots could only carry one hub at a time, but the students quickly figured out strategies to move large numbers of hubs without lifting them.

The competition is based on the VEX robotics system and is the biggest and fastest growing youth robotics competition in the world.

New Zealand sent 90 students between the ages of 11 and 18, including their support teams to this year’s event, with teams from Taranaki, Feilding, Palmerston North, Auckland and Tauranga.

In an emailed statement, Chris Hamling, from Kiwibots, said Tara and Riley’s win made them the best all-girl robotics team in the world for their age group.

They showed just how good young Kiwis are at innovating, building and programming robots to compete, Hamling said.

The Taranaki duo are part of Nakibots, an after school club created by parents keen on helping their intermediate and high school kids learn about STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and use it to create and be innovative.

In 11 years of competition Kiwi teams have been crowned world champions and division champions ten times.