What did you get up to at high school? Did you get to build any robots? Feilding High School maths teacher Graham Conlon is also the school's head of robotics and his team are on a roll.

At the national robotics championships last weekend they won the one National award that has always eluded them and now they're getting ready to go to Louisville, Kentucky to compete at the world robotics championships this April.

Graham told Jesse Mulligan the students had lots of fun working on the project.

“We had lots and lots of fun and some massive design disasters and some super-duper successes but we’ve been really excited this year to win the design award that we’ve never managed to get.”

The robots are built from something akin to Meccano, he says.

“It comes as a kit …. it comes with holes, we bolt it together and put motors on it and chains and cogs and elastic bands.”

The same pool of parts is use by schools entering from all over the world, he says.

“We use them in different ways to come up with a different solution to the problem.”

Graham says this isn’t a game for just rich schools.

“We’re a small country school, we’ve qualified this week and worlds [championship] on 22 April so we’re trying to raise a lot of money very, very fast.

"But to be fair there’s a parts limit on the motors. For a school to get started you’d need a reasonable amount of money, say $2000 but one of the great beauties for me is that we say to the boys and the girls; look I’m not going to buy you everything you want, you’ve got to prove that you really need it then go an fundraise then go and get some sponsorship because that is actually part of real life engineering.”

It’s a culture of make do, he says.

“We’ll make our prototype robots out of cardboard and wood, rather than buying aluminium.”

Working with robotics is great multi-disciplinary education, he says.

"All of this robotics is about what they call STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and they all go hand-in-hand.

“One of the great beauties about this is that the children are doing the maths as part of their robotics, so it gives them a reason to do the maths.

“It creates a bunch of youngsters ready to go to university, and to apprentices, understanding what design is, what build is, what failure is.”

He says the students are “absolutely going bananas” with excitement at a shot at the World Championships.

“The World Championship Robotics is absolutely huge and New Zealand is one of the biggest and strongest countries in the world. So, New Zealand teams have won world titles multiple times, but no New Zealand team has ever won the world design award, which is what we are so excited about because we are going to have a crack at it and see if we can bring it back for the first time.”