The fourth North Devon Robotics Challenge took place on Wednesday 18th March 2026 at North Devon College in Barnstaple, Devon.
Teams of Year 7 students from schools in Devon had been given a set of challenges at the start of February to work on in their schools, before presenting their work in a spirit of friendly competition at North Devon College.
The teams worked in pairs on four challenges; three involving programming Edison robots to meet engineering specifications, and a fourth challenge to design a conceptual robot. Since North Devon College are working with Maritime South-West this year on maritime projects based in Devon, the conceptual robot was required to perform some task related to the maritime industry in Devon.
The aim of the competition, sponsored by the Institution of Engineering and Technology and Firefly Robotics Educational Charity, was to encourage engineering thinking to design solutions to the challenges; program the robots to meet the challenges, and to improve the programs as a result of real-world testing.
The three programming challenges were to make the robot navigate maze, to make the robot clear a set of wooden blocks from an 800mm x 800mm square, and to make the robot navigate around two concentric squares, 480mm x 480mm inside a 960mm x 960mm square.
A significant engineering challenge which the students found was that the robots are not very precise. When asked to turn through 90 degrees, the robot may turn though somewhere between 70 and 110 degrees. The students found that by recalibrating the robots, they turned more accurately, and that making the robots turn more slowly also improved accuracy.
The students also found that the surface used in the competition at North Devon College had different friction qualities than the surfaces they had used in their schools to test the robots. This led to quite a lot of last minute changes to programs to try to overcome problem encountered.
As well as competing against each other to see whose robot was fastest or achieved the best score, each team was scored by judges on their program designs, and how they could have improved their programs, having seen the issues which arose.
All the teams’ robots performed well, and a number had novel and clever designs. One robot program worthy of special mention was the design created by the team from Blundells School in the block clearing challenge. Their design “hunted” for a block to clear by moving forward in leftward and rightward steps until a block was detected, then the block was pushed to the edge of the square, before reversing to ensure the block wasn’t moved back into the square.
The teams working on the conceptual design challenge produced a number of innovative ideas and designs, with a number of designs aimed at improving ocean floor quality, and one stand-out design by South Molton Community College, to monitor invasive lionfish by developing a robotic drone camouflaged as a lionfish. The winning design, however, which included a Lego model of the conceptual robot, was produced by Kingsley School, who therefore won the inaugural Firefly Robotics prize.
The overall competition was won by the team from South Molton Community College, who performed well in all the challenges. The South Molton team was chosen after the school used the UK Bebras Challenge (https://www.bebras.uk/) to identify students who may perform well in the competition, and the resulting team comprised five girl and three boys; the first time any team in the North Devon Robotics Challenge has had a majority of girls. Perhaps a first step towards becoming the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year in the not too distant future.
Thanks are due to North Devon College, for providing an excellent venue, the IET and Firefly for providing prizes and judges, Olivia and Clive, STEM ambassadors who helped judge the competition, and most of all to the schools, the teachers and students for their hard work leading up to the competition, and for the spirit in which they competed.
Images show the winning team from South Molton Community College, the block clearing challenge, and the maze challenge.
