About
The School Robot Competition is a joint project of the UK-RAS Network and Twinkl which ran in 2019 and 2020. This exciting competition was open to all UK schoolchildren aged from 8 – 14 years.
In 2020 we added two new competitions to our school robot portfolio — Draw a Robot and Once Upon a Robot — which challenged UK schoolchildren aged between 5 and 11 years to design a robot they’d like to see in the future, and to write a short story featuring robots. These popular competitions returned in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and received large numbers of entries from across the country.
Twinkl are a thriving educational publisher with the largest collection of high quality digital teaching materials in the world. They are proud to create educational resources that can be used at each step of a child’s learning journey. Their teacher-created resources provide entire schemes of work, lesson planning and assessments right through to online educational games, augmented reality and so much more. They have over 525,000 resources and new content gets added every day.
All Twinkl resources are teacher-made and can be used by anyone, anywhere – making learning accessible to all.
Twinkl also have a fantastic selection of Augmented Reality (AR) games, including an unveiling of a brand new game called ARchitect. In this open ended game, children are given the task of building a tower or a building from scratch using a choice of different materials. Using real-world physics, blocks of ice will slide around on top of each other, others will have more friction while some may be too heavy for the material beneath it. All taking place in front of your eyes!
ARchitect challenges children to think carefully about materials, elements and how they interact. Incorporating science and mathematic skills to engage high achieving and lower ability children through highly interactive elements and an easy pick-up-and-play style. It’s a ground-breaking game….literally!
School Robot Competition
Applying this methodology, they created a new AR game for exclusively for our School Robot Competition in 2019, which launched on 27th March 2019.
In 2020 the School Robot Competition returned with an improved augmented reality app and a new set of challenges to test children’s design and engineering skills to their limits on the surface of Mars.
Draw a Robot Competition
The Draw a Robot Competition, launched in 2020 as part of our Robotics Week 2020 celebrations, challenged Key Stage 1 children to draw a robot for the future. Brains on Board, the Nuclear AMRC and Tate Kids were competition partners.
The competition returned in 2021, supported by RAIN Hub and the Design Museum. The 2022 competition was supported by the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and the Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA) Hub. The final competition ran in 2023 and was supported by the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (TAS).
Once Upon a Robot Competition
The Once Upon a Robot Competition, launched in 2020 as part of our Robotics Week 2020 celebrations, challenged Key Stage 2 children to write a creative story about robots. Pipebots, NCNR and Bloomsbury Publishing were competition partners.
The competition returned in 2021, supported by FAIR-SPACE. The 2022 competition was supported by Heriot-Watt University’s National Robotarium and Pipebots. The final competition ran in 2023 and was supported by the Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab and The National Robotarium.