General News
21 August, 2026
Students learn real-life skills at RoboCup Junior
Creative thinking, technological understanding, and teamwork were on display at the Wimmera Lutheran College’s Horsham Campus on Tuesday, August 18, at the RoboCup Junior regional event.
Creative thinking, technological understanding, and teamwork were on display at the Wimmera Lutheran College’s Horsham Campus on Tuesday, August 18, at the RoboCup Junior regional event.
Students put their programming to the test in a variety of robotics challenges simulating critical real-life situations in Rescue Line and Rescue Maze, and competed against opposing teams in Soccer.
RoboCup Junior is an educational initiative that sponsors local, regional, and international robotics events for young students and operates as an extracurricular program from Year 5 to senior years at Wimmera Lutheran College.
“(RoboCup is a) non-profit organisation; the idea is they just get kids into engineering, into robotics,” Wimmera Lutheran College teacher and RoboCup volunteer Adam Engert said.
“We start with regional events across all states, with the idea that our students at these events can workshop with one of the RoboCup volunteers, and they pretty much learn the robotics but also in a competitive environment… and that will get us ready for a much larger event,” he said.
Students have spent months designing and engineering their robots for the regional event, building on critical STEM competencies and developing key leadership and sportsmanship skills.
“There's opportunity for our students to go all the way through to Year 12, increasingly adding new technologies, new components,” Mr Engert said.
“It sets them up so that they can do engineering at universities.”
“When we talk to some of our students who have gone through RoboCup, they’re now in mechatronics at Uni; they're saying RoboCup’s harder than Uni.”