Queen Mary’s College’s Robotics team has won the Excellence in Engineering Award (sponsored by UK Electronics Skills Foundation), in the 2025 Robotics Competition.
What is the Robotics Competition?
The Student Robotics competition is an annual event for teams of 16 to 19 year olds. They are challenged to design, build, and programme self-sufficient, independent robots. Teams have six months to complete their robot after the challenge brief. All supplies, including the robotics kits, are provided free of charge by Student Robotics.
The Challenge
This year, Student Robotics tasked teams with a series of challenges concerning movement, mechanics, and sensing (the three core pillars of a successful robot), throughout the competition year. In this way, teams were probed to start working on their robots early. The order in which each component was completed was determined by the teams themselves.
If a team completed the preliminary challenges before the deadlines, they could earn bonus points, which could play a major role when finalising the total points.
The Game: Urban Heights
This year’s game, Urban Heights, required teams to shape their ‘city’s skyline’ by transporting pallets of building materials to various locations. In a bid to secure extra points, teams could stack their materials on top of each other to create the tallest stack in each location, raising the difficulty level.
An Early Head Start
Queen Mary’s College placed joint second in the first part of the competition through a virtual league. Coding skills were put to the test as teams battled it out in a simulated version of the main competition.
Main Event
With 50 in person matches and knockout rounds over an entire weekend, Queen Mary’s College was selected to win the Excellence in Engineering Award, which recognises ingenuity in robot design. As stated by Student Robotics, “Their robot sported precise movement, innovative design, and a column stack mechanism which allowed them to precisely stack pallets to ensure theirs were the highest.” 
An Opportunity for Learning
Students who competed in the event are currently studying various STEM subjects including Maths, Double Maths, Further Maths, Computer Science, Electronics and Physics. The Robotics team is a great example of just one of the super-curricular activities available to students at QMC. Taking part in Robotics, and specifically the Robotics Competition, is a valuable opportunity for our future engineers to:
- Develop their ‘hard’, technical skills such as coding in languages such as Python.
- Honing ‘soft’ skills, including team collaboration, communication, and critical thinking,
- Display their creative and practical skills through immersive, hands-on robot design and building.
Words From the Director of Learning
“The QMC Robotics team put in a huge amount of effort towards building, coding & testing their 2025 robot and were awarded the ‘Excellence in Engineering’ prize at the competition. As in every Student Robotics competition, a degree of luck is involved, but if not for an unfortunate knock on our neatly stacked tokens, our robot would have progressed further through the knockouts. Despite this, the team should be proud of their 2nd place in the virtual competition, their 7th place in the league, and their recognition from the judges of the quality of their design. They worked brilliantly as a team and were a credit to the college.” — Nick Everett, Director of Learning for Science, Computing and Information Technology.
