Celebrating Kiwi Success

With NZ's tech success story, Rocket Lab, going public yesterday - it's a timely reminder to look at all the incredible successes our students achieve every year on the global stage at the VEX World Championships. Kiwibots kids are absolutely following in the footsteps of changemakers like Peter Beck, and we can't wait for the future with these kids at the helm.

With support from The Royal Society, our students competed in the live virtual championships of May this year and snagged a number of top awards for Aotearoa. We are so proud of them as we won an award at every grade too! Ka pai koutou! 👏

It's worth noting in this too that we were lucky enough to run a primarily in-person season for 2020-21, and as such the students had robots designed for the in-person rules.

In some ways, our students were disadvantaged heading into the worlds against teams who had spend the last 6-10 months preparing for online challenges with designs specific to those rules, so we are especially proud of how well our tamariki adapted and rose to the challenge.

Throw into the mix some very early morning starts for our young'uns as they do their interviews at 6am NZST to meet with judges in the USA. Thanks to all the teachers and parents who supported them through a pretty exhausting week!

A massive congratulations to all our teams that represented NZ on the world stage in Live Remote Tournaments and Live Remote Skills - Lynfield College, Rubixcoders, Skywalker Robotics, House of Science Tauranga, NakiBots, TopCat, Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School, and College Street Normal School.

🏆 House of Science Tauranga 8757A - Engineering subdivision champions and Innovate Award winners

🏆 Skywalker Robotics 3168S - Create Award winners

🏆 College Street Normal School 2223E Phoenix - Innovate Award winners

🏆 AURA - VEX Innovators Award

🏆 Craig Yearbury - Inspiration All-Star Award and VEX Hall of Fame