First Tech Challenge West Midlands

On March 28th, a team of 15 students from Year 7 to Year 11 travelled to the RAF Cosford Museum to compete in the First Tech Challenge West Midlands regional tournament. They built a robot and an engineering portfolio, and competed with 23 other schools across the West Midlands. The theme of this tournament is “More than Robots”, and our team embodied that perfectly! Not only did the robot make the semi-final tiebreaker, the students themselves were commended for their energy, enthusiasm and generosity.

Our team “Meliora” were the runners up for the Motivate Award, which celebrates students who embrace the culture of FIRST and show what it means to be a team. They promoted a love of STEM to those around them, and showed gracious professionalism and respect to everyone at the event. They were commended by other teams for radiating endless positivity and support, not just for themselves but for other teams too.

Half of the final awards were presented by students from St Margaret Ward, who showed bravery and determination to stand up alone in front of 24 schools, staff, mentors and industry professionals.

A huge congratulations to Misbah, Khadija, Momina, Zumar, Amina, Angela, Oscar, Michael, Talya, Sophie, Isabelle, Acacia, Farhan, Sumaiyah and Grace for your incredible performance! Many thanks to Mr Foster, who helped our team to rebuild part of their robot arm at the event.  Best wishes as well to our sister Trinity Sixth Form school St John Fisher, who made it to the national final with a team who really inspired ours to do better next year. Good luck! Let’s achieve this together in 2024.