Basketball-playing robot built by sixth-formers wins tech competition

Key developments are emerging from the global stage. Meet the UK's very own LeBron James... but not as you know it3 days ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleRobbie MeredithEducation and arts correspondent, News NIBBCThe robot won Friends' School first prize in a UK-wide competitionLook out LeBron James and Michael Jordan, there's a new basketball champ around. But it was made in Lisburn rather than Los Angeles or Chicago.

The name 25416 may not appear on many replica vests, but it can shoot hoops like no-one else. And the basketball-playing robot won a school in Lisburn first prize at the UK-wide First Tech Challenge robotics competition. 18-year-old Aaron Portis was part of the winning teamThe team of sixth-formers from Friends' School came top of 48 schools from across the UK at the competition held in London's Copper Box Arena.

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18-year-old Aaron Portis was part of the team and said he "loved working on it". "Going down and working on it with my friends is honestly one of the highlights of my last year in school," he said. Aaron said the theme of the competition in 2026 was "pretty much robot basketball".

"The challenge wasn't how are we going to shoot the balls but how is everything going to knit together so we can do it the quickest," he said. 'Teamwork is the main focus'The team from the school spent "hundreds of hours" designing, building and programming the robot, according to Aaron. "There's no one person on this team who knows how to do everything," he said.

"Really teamwork is the main focus. ""It's not that easy to have a blow-away robot that can score hundreds of points every game. "It meant that the 'drivers' controlling the robot had to be "quick on your wheels," according to Aaron.

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"It is exciting, it's not ten nerds in a room! It's a full arena, it's a pretty big thing," he said. Jonathan said each member brought something different to the teamFor his fellow team member, 18-year-old Jonathan Gillespie, everyone found their "niche" when creating the robot.

"There's a hardware side and a software side, so as part of hardware we had to figure out how physically to pick up the balls and store them inside," he said. "So finding a way to store those balls inside the robot and then you weren't allowed to expand at all to shoot the balls so we had to figure out a shooter that we could use to do that. ""One of our team members Samuel was really good at figuring out the shooter early on in the season and that meant that we could develop it throughout the whole year to get it as accurate as we possibly could.

""I run a lot of the 3D printing and the manufacturing side rather than the design side. "Jonathan said that when it came to the competition "a lot of the games were very tight". "The real thing that we had to do was shoot the balls as fast as possible and pick up the balls as fast as possible to maximise the number that we could shoot," he said.

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