KIDS, ROBOTS & INDUSTRY: A SENSE-IBLE COMBINATION

Primary and secondary school students in years 3-10 from across the CQ region gathered to demonstrate their skills at designing, building and coding robots recently. Participants competed for several awards including GRC (Grit, Resilience and Cooperation) Champions, Most Enthusiastic and Innovative, Best Robot Design, Most Improved, and Best Team Spirit.  

Students competed in either the beginner ‘alumina transport’ challenge or advanced ‘alumina transport and refinement’ challenge division. In the competition, teams coded their robots to race against the clock to follow the transportation pathway of bauxite from Rio Tinto’s mining operations in the Gulf of Carpentaria to be processed into alumina at the Queensland Alumina Limited (QAL) and Rio Tinto Yarwun refineries. This pathway is represented on industry themed mats. The bauxite-alumina corridor is represented by a black line and student encountered real-life obstacles along the way. Advanced division students completed the beginner transport mat and took the next step of designing additional attachments and programming to mimic the process of bauxite moving through the Bayer Process to be refined into alumina, including spins during digestion and the pushing of the waste slurry to the red mud dam during clarification.