Memento Mori.

The name of a young team of robotics engineers from Highgate School, London, that we are sponsoring as part of our commitment to nurturing young people within the country in STEM.

The team is composed of Milan, Maddy, Yasmin, and Miles—a bright and brilliant bunch who are currently contending within the VEX Robotics competitions.

This is a series of robotics competitions designed for students from elementary school right to college. They are organised by the Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation and are one of the largest and fastest-growing robotics competition programs in the world. They provide students with hands-on experience in designing, building, and programming robots to complete specific tasks or challenges.

Milan, Maddy, Yasmin and Miles got introduced into Robotics in year six, competed in year 7, but started making some real head-way in year 9.

 “Covid put a stop in things until year nine. After that we took much more control over our own team, instead of being run by the school, we became much more independent and began to understand what we were doing.”

“We thought we’d put a load of effort into it and see how it goes. And so, we won our first competition. From there we put more time into it and just enjoyed all aspects of it. Like the repetitiveness, which could sound boring but—just slowly getting better felt quite good.”

VEX promotes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Participants learn about robotics, problem-solving skills, teamwork, and project management. Competitions often include judging categories for aspects like design, innovation, and teamwork in addition to the overall game performance. Teams can win in various categories. Over 50 countries compete in the competitions. Memento Mori have learnt how to build, design, drive the robots, code, and more.

Triple Crown Winners

Memento Mori recently won the triple-crown in September at the regional VEX robotics competition and took home three trophies for different aspects of their, and their robots performance (who they’ve named after the chipmunks character Alvin).

This robot in particular has been designed to shoot something they refer to within the competition as acorns, (hence the robots name).

“The core premise of this year is to manipulate something called the acorns. Triangles that you need to get into certain goals on the field. This year we wanted really fast cycle times. That’s the time it takes to get a ball and score it. Design wise the robot needs to be able to shoot these with a certain force. We built wings on our robot so that we could slot all the acorns in at once, it was quite an ambitious build.”

We asked them what their plans were after leaving school and whether they see robotics having a place in their futures.

“At Uni we can compete in VEX U, which something we’ll definitely consider doing. I’ll be doing engineering at Uni, mechanical or even aerospace engineering but I’ll definitely be continuing robotics. It’s super useful because robotics means problem solving. Find the best solution for a challenge and trying to make that progress.”

We wish Memento Mori the best of luck for the competitions ahead. Watch this space to stay informed on this bright and brilliant team!