PUPILS from a school in Hoddesdon have claimed two of the top three places in  a nationwide competition.The John Warner School in Stanstead Road sent two teams to the World Skills  UK event.

They competed against 30 competitors from across the country in designing,  building and programming a robot that had to collect bags and redistribute them  around an arena.

Four students from the school competed at the event last week – Javan Willock  and Jamie D’Ath made up one team and Daniel Rowe and James Griffin the  other.

After two days of intense competion, they found out the good news.

Jamie and Javan were awarded the bronze medal and James and Daniel were  awarded the World Skills UK mobile robotics gold medal.

John Warner’s subject leader for engineering, Stuart Higham, praised their  efforts.

He said: “This success is the result of many months of hard work, planning,  programming and perseverance from the two teams and a lot of their success can  be tied to the excellent work they did leading up to the competition.

“Their planning in particular helped them overcome unforeseen problems and  allowed them to adapt to the changing situation of the competition.

“The students demonstrated fantastic programming, building and design skills  and also have a superb portfolio of work which will help them gain university,  college or apprenticeship places when the time comes.

“World Skills UK is one of the highest arenas in which students can compete  within the UK and the students should be immensely proud of their achievement.”

The task was spread over two days with competitors having five chances for  their design to operate within the playing field.

The first of the two days was spent programming the robot and working on  code, while the second saw students use the code they had written to set the  robots on the path to success.

Daniel said: “We planned for every possibility and were able to use our  knowledge of what we were competing in to enable us to succeed in this  competition.

Javan said: “Working in a team of two was harder this time because I had to  step up and really know what I was doing instead of sitting back and rely on  someone else’s shoulder.”

James said: “We were off to a bit of a rough start.

“It was quite stressful but as we had planned well we believed in ourselves  and knew that we could get to the end.”