Students battle it out in robot wars

WINNERS Sonic Boom with team, from left, Mohammad Fezan, Heather Fish, Sophie Porter, Mohammed Ali, Isaac Jackson and Georgia Jones

MECHANICAL mayhem came to Radclyffe School this week as five teams of students built and battled their own monstrous machines

They designed and built deadly radio-controlled robots ­- complete with flippers, pichers and cutters ­- to celebrate the return of the cult TV programme Robot Wars.

Each team was supplied with a basic chassis, but let their creativity run wild to make a machine that was robust enough to defend itself in battle but also equipped with a weapon to defeat its rivals.

The first challenge saw the robots playing football, scoring points for getting the ball out of the arena. Then there were battles as the they fought each other and a "house robot" ­- with Firespitter, created by a team of year seven and eight pupils, crowned champion.

Robot Wars ran on BBC 2 from 1998 to 2003 before moving to Channel 5 for a year, making household names of home-made robots such as Chaos, Killer and Panic Attack. They had to fight each other in an arena laced with obstacles such as flame pits while staying out of the grasp of house robots with names like Sir Killalot and Sergeant Bash.

The programme returns to BBC 2 this year and pupils at the Chadderton secondary worked with Roaming Robots, the company responsible for the Robot Wars live tour.