Team from Mayo stars at World Robotics event
The fifth-class pupils from St Joseph's Primary School in Ballinrobe are pictured at their homecoming from this year’s VEX IQ World Robotics Finals.
Students from St Joseph’s Primary School in Ballinrobe received the Sportsmanship Award at the VEX IQ World Robotics Championships in Dallas earlier this month.
Nine fifth-class pupils and their teachers, Ms Edel Roache and Mr Sean Flannelly, made the trip on May 10, along with parents.
This is the second year in a row that pupils from St Joseph’s Primary School have competed at the VEX IQ World Robotics Championships, with the school also receiving honours at last year’s event when the team collected the Innovate Award for its skills in demonstrating an effective and well-documented engineering design process for a specific aspect of its project.
This year the south Mayo school finished 33rd in the world, as well as picking up the Sportsmanship Award.
There were joyous scenes at St Joseph’s on Saturday, May 17, as the team returned home from their adventure with the prestigious accolade.
Teacher Edel Roache was delighted with how the pupils performed on the world stage.
“It is amazing and we just cannot believe that we were able to achieve something the second time around on the world stage.
"The award was for the way that our team were able to present themselves in their team interview, and our school was very respectful both inside and outside of the arena.
"The hard was done before we travelled over there (Dallas) and the students would have spent weeks and months building and programming the robot, and working on their logbook. They wouldn’t have been seen by the judges if they had not done well initially”.
It was a busy schedule for the pupils at the World Finals.
“On Monday we had the opening ceremony, and then later in that afternoon we had our first practice match," said Ms Roache. "Tuesday was then a full day of back-to-back games (seven games), and on Wednesday we had three games before the closing ceremony. Before that ceremony, we were awarded the Sportsmanship Award. There were very few awards given out, and I think there were 85 teams in our division.
"There were pupils from all over the world including America, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. There were 53 countries in total taking part.
“Last year we were representing Ireland as we were the country’s only representative. There were three other Primary Schools from Ireland taking part this time round, so this year we tried to use the theme that we were the Mayo and Connacht representatives."
Ms Roache believes that the future is bright for St Joseph’s Primary School.
“We might find other challenges and we are discussing different types of programmes which would open up robotics, as well as coding and programming to the school."
She thanked the team's sponsors and all those who donated through the school and online.
Sean Flannelly said the pupils displayed sportsmanship but were also resilient and there was great teamwork involved.
“They supported other teams who were also competing. They were allied with a team who were much younger and they got a low score with them, however, our team shook hands with them and kept encouraging them the whole way through the competition.
"The pupils also displayed great resilience. We wouldn’t have been in the running for that award if we were not strong in every other category. There were also follow-up interviews, and the pupil’s logbook had also been rated very highly. There were only eight or nine awards presented to those 80-plus teams taking part.
"The elementary section is for children under-12 and in that section we were the only Irish school to receive an award."
St Joseph’s worked alongside teams from all around the world, and they even found time to sing .
“We worked with a couple of teams from America, Singapore, China, and from Dubai, UAE," said Mr Flannelly. “Our pupils had the ukuleles and were playing .
"There were people from all different countries who probably didn’t know what we were singing about; however, it was nice to bring a bit of Mayo to the world stage.
"Helen O’Shea (Ballinrobe) was great at organising the homecoming and she was also updating the St. Joseph’s VEX Robotics Team Facebook page as well”.
Mr Flannelly believes the future is bright for robotics in primary schools.
"We are committed to exploring robotics and our aim is to always offer that opportunity to pupils in Ballinrobe. When it comes to competitions, we just have to see what the future holds and take each year as it comes.
There are so many schools and teams in Mayo and Galway that have really engaged with these VEX robotics programmes. For any team to get there (World Championships) and participate in, it is a wonderful experience. The awards are great, but participating in these competitions is a real positive.”
The St. Joseph’s fifth-class pupils involved in this year’s VEX IQ World Robotics Championships were: Rian Hennelly, Matthew O’Toole, Jacob Connolly, Jack Daly, Roland Roche Szabo, Kayla Gilraine, Andrew Gentry, Emilia Slowik, Hazel DeRhen, Aoibhín Kelly, and Adam Heneghan.
Well done to all involved.
