OXLEY High will begin teaching robotics to Year 7 students from 2019 following a boom in interest in the subject.
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It comes the school’s relatively new robotics team had a big win at a recent competition in Sydney, knocking-off competitiors from top private schools, including Barker College and Pymble Ladies’ College, as well as a number of university teams.
“It’s all gone a bit crazy,” Oxley maths teacher and robotics mentor Josh Vigar said.
The Tamworth team joined forces with three other techno-troupes from the Illawarra region to claim the First Australia Duel Down Under
The Duel Down Under was an invitational robotics competition which followed-on from Oxley’s entry in a nationwide competition earlier this year.
Since the first competition which saw a team of five compiled from the Tamworth high school, interest in the subject has boomed, Mr Vigar said, with 26 students “on the books”.
“We’re pretty visible around the school, and we’ve done outreach to other schools in town,” he said.
He said he was working with council to get a school holiday program up and running in the near future.
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Mr Vigar believed the robotics project would grow interest in STEM subjects at Oxley.
“I think it will, students are already starting l to look at what elective subjects they’re doing next year and a number are picking engineering,” he said.
“Next year, we’ll be teaching robotics to year 7 and 8.”
The North West region has produced a strong output in robotics recently with Wee Waa’s Bush Bots team winning through to a world championship event in Texas.