Over the weekend of 22 and 23 June, Iona Fusion, St Columba’s robotics team, travelled to Sydney to participate in the Duel Down Under hosted at Macquarie University. This robotics event showcases teams from across Australia in what is the last official event of the year.
Unfortunately this year, due to a smaller venue, we could only take a small team to the event consisting of senior students and our drive team. Iona Fusion competed extremely well throughout the competition with consistency clearly evident in the team’s strategy. At the end of the first day of competition, the team was ranked in second place. This provided much excitement for our team and enthusiasm coming into the second day.
We started the second day of the competition with a few close matches and achieved the status of fourth place alliance captain for the finals. The finals were full of excitement and we played some of our strongest matches in the early qualifiers. Unfortunately, field electronics experienced a blackout and the last games of the competition were suspended. Our team finished as high as they could before the suspension games and I am certain 7433 would have been competitive in the final.
A huge thank you to our team’s sponsors, JBL Glass, who have supported our team for many years, Rusty TradeR Workwear, and Millwauke,. Without the generous support of our sponsors and community, we wouldn’t have been able to provide these experiences and opportunities to grow our team.
Congratulations to all students of the Iona Fusion 7433 Robotics Team on the many successes you have achieved this year.
Next semester the team looks to step into a new competition called VEX and test their skills and expertise in a different arena.
Justin Munro – Coordinator Design, Art & Technology
and Iona Fusion Lead Mentor
