On the 10th and 11th of December last year, Robogals London ran a hugely successful and exciting event as part of the European Robotics Festival. The event took place at the Science Museum, next door to the Imperial College London campus where Robogals London is based, one of the most popular museums in central London.

As part of the robotics festival, we ran nine 40 minute workshops over the whole weekend. In each workshop we took six groups, usually made up of one or two families, and gave them a pre-built and pre-programmed castor robot along with a kit of LEGO Mindstorm NXT 2.0. Their task was to use our building instructions to transform these ordinary robots into sumo robots that would compete in a sumo competition at the end of the workshop. The aim of the workshops was to inspire children to realise that engineering and science could be much more fun than what they would normally expect.

Once the teams had built the basic sumo robot structure, they also had the chance to customise their robots with extra LEGO parts, stickers and coloured cards. We had lots of great designs and some very fearsome looking robots!

We had a great range of people attending the workshops, from very young toddlers right up to adults, and each one of them glowed with enthusiasm. The workshops were extremely popular, and we had lots of parents expressing their wishes that we would be at the Science Museum the following weekend too! In total, around 200 people attended our workshops, which we are very pleased to have achieved.

At the end of each workshop we had two three-way sumo battles, and one final battle between the heat winners to determine the overall winner. We awarded each of the winning children with a prize of their very own toy robot, and they were all very excited to have a photo of themselves with their prize up on the wall of winners that we had displayed throughout the weekend.

It was a really fun weekend for everyone involved, and we hope to have many more collaborations between Robogals and the Science Museum in the future. A massive thank you to all of our hardworking members that helped prepare for the day and helped out at the workshops.