SATRO Regionals Victory

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Congratulations to our Year 9 and 11 teams who both won their heats for the SATRO Problem Solving competition. A write up from a member of the Year 11 team is below.

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Following a landslide victory in the qualifying round at school, our team (Theo, Nithilan, Vahin, Harshith, Arnav) was selected to represent Wilson’s KS4 in the regional SATRO heat at St Philomena’s. There were many schools present, each with on average three teams for each age group.

We were presented with a difficult challenge: build a contraption to slide down a ramp and launch a Lego block as far as possible when it reaches the bottom, using predominantly stationery materials and tape. Following a series of brainstorms, failures, indecisiveness, and improvisations, we scrambled for 90 minutes until we decided to gamble on a last-minute idea to delay releasing the energy stored in a stretched elastic band with pins and blue tack. It was really a go big or go home strategy, but we decided that we fancied those odds. Following an initial failure, the second attempt miraculously resulted in a sweeping victory for our team in our age group, and the second-highest score out of all groups in all the heats! Points were based on a 150-minus system, the lower the better. Whilst many teams failed to get lower than 130 and move their block at all, we achieved a score of 2.5.

We would also like to thank the KS3 and KS5 teams for hyping us up, as well as Mr Carew-Robinson and Dr Karamath for their support (especially Dr Karamath for finishing the biscuits). The KS3 team also won in their age group, using a long rolling ramp, and building enough momentum to slide the block off using its inertia. This means we have secured two Wilson's teams for the final round! We hope that the odds will be in our favour once more on Thursday, 27 March, during the final at the University of Surrey.

Article written by Theo (Year 11)