#HighPeakYouthRobotics
High Peak Youth Robotics 2024/2025
New Youth Group
After being approached by a group of local young people (and the necessary fundraising), we set-up this new youth group in September 2024 to enable them to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge, a national robotics competition. You can find out about the Challenge on the FIRST website here. We were 1 of only 7 community-based teams competiting in the UK this year, out of 198 teams!
The main objective of the project was to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge regional competition event in Sheffield in March 2025. We hosted weekly, term-time workshops between September 2024 and March 2025 at Buxton Methodist Church to work towards this. These were delivered by members of the Funny Wonders team, led by Dave Lydford of Not Just Bricks (and formally Brick Corner). Dave also runs the FIRST LEGO League for younger participants. Some local engineers also came along to offer advice and support to the group.
Incredibly, the group placed second (out of 15) at regionals and qualified for the national championships in June!! Read more about the regionals event here. As a new team (and the only community-based team at the event), that’s an amazing achievement!
We ran two further workshops to get ready for nationals plus some fundraising activities, including attending the Rotary Summer Fair in May, to get the team (and robot!) to London. At the national championships, we were 1 of 4 community-based teams, out of the 64 competing. Read about the group’s experience at nationals here.
Thanks
The first year of High Peak Youth Robotics club has been made possible through funding from Herefordshire Community Foundation (Joanies Fund) plus further grants and financial donations from Buxton4Youth, Tarmac, Timpson, High Peak Mayoral Charity (Buxton & District) and Otter Controls Ltd. We are also in receipt of a bursary from FIRST, to enable us to participate, and robot parts from Buxton-based, Smart Engineering UK. The group is also very grateful to have received kit donations from Buxton-based Altrad Belle and Manchester-based You Make Robots. Buxton Rotary and some private contributiors also made donations to help get the team to nationals.
See the project’s GoFundMe page >> https://www.gofundme.com/f/high-peak-youth-robotics-compete-in-the-first-tech-challenge
Participants
A Challenge team can consist of up to 15 people.
It was open to all young people in the High Peak, but we particularly welcomed those with neurodiversity, those who are home-educated or not in education or those who experience barriers to accessing (or enjoying) STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in their traditional form whilst at school. We also aimed to have 50:50 split of boys and girls.
Workshops
The workshops were free to attend and took place on term-time Tuesday evenings, 6pm to 7.30pm in the Lower Room at Buxton Methodist Church – the church on the Market Place (SK17 6HX).
Sign Up
Participants could sign-up to the team via a form on our website, until all 15 places were filled.
If you would like to join a waitlist, should any spaces open up, please email highpeakyouthrobotics@funnywonders.org.uk.
Safeguarding
Funny Wonders has a comprehensive Safeguarding Policy and working procedures. All members of the delivery team undergo enhanced DBS checks and safeguarding awareness training. All activities and venues are risk-assessed with mental health and wellbeing, physical safety, data privacy and environmental impact all considered.
Sign Up
If you would like to register a young person for the youth club, please complete the form below.
The questions are designed to provide us with logistical information, to ensure we are reaching our target group (as per the grant funding we have obtained to deliver the project) and to ensure we have a diverse group of young people.
We will let you know as soon as possible if a place is available for your young person.
The information you provide will be used and held in accordance with our Data Protection & Confidentiality Policy and will not be shared. By completing the form, your consent for us to collect your data is implied. You can find our full Privacy Statement on our Policy & Procedure page here.
***UPDATE*** There are only a couple of places remaining and these are open to girls only.
This form is currently closed for submissions.
Workshops
Workshops took place between 17 September 2024 and 29 April 2025. Activities have included: teamwork puzzles, design, learning about the challenge – what we need the robot to be able to do (and the many, many rules!), unboxing the robotics kit, setting up the laptop with the comms/coding software, building the robot base and getting the robot base to speak to the control unit. We also had a visit from a FIRST representive who answered some of our questions and two local engineers – J Michaelis from Neater Solutions Ltd and Dave Goodway – who helped to refine the robot design.
Regionals
We attended the FIRST regional scrimmage in Chesterfield in December 2024, a friendly event to meet other teams, check on our progress and have the opportunity to practice in the competition field arena; and the regional competition in Sheffield in March 2025. The team won all their qualifying matches and then placed second overall, following the play-off matches, qualifying for the national finals in the process. They also won the judges’ Think Award for problem-solving. Read more about the day on our news post here.
Buxton Rotary Fair
To promote the group, raise some funds and practise for nationals, members of the team and group had a stall at the Buxton Rotary Summer Fair & Charity Bazaar at the Pavilion Gardens on Saturday 31 May 2025. We demonstrated the robot and ran some guess competitions: the name of the robot, the number of bolts on the robot, the weight of the robot; and the number of nuts and bolts in a jar. Members of the group also made some “Billerobot” keyrings, as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of The Billerettes at the fair. We sold out on the day but are taking orders to make more: if you’d like one, please get in touch!
Thanks to Outwood Academy Newbold for the loan of their challenge arena. It fit in our space with only centimetres to spare!
Nationals
FIRST UK National Championships at the Copper Box Arena in London on 26-27 June 2025. Read about their experience on our news blog here.
