Team Sri Lanka 2017

Our team was brought together by their love of coding and robotics. All our team members are active member of the school’s coding and robotics clubs. As a team, the students have not participated in any robotics competitions before. As a school, we have sent teams to participate in the following competitions.

  • Sri Lanka Robotics Challenge
  • SAITM Robotics Competition 2014
  • SAITM Robotics Competition 2015
  • Xbotix Robotics competition (organized by University of Ruhuna)

Ali (17 years) – this deep, big thinker is our team leader. He was chosen as team leader and spokesperson because of his ability to think big and beyond and because the others (teacher included) feared the consequences if they did not pick him. Ali is able to articulate his wildest thoughts clearly and can hold a crowd with his wit, charm and passion. He will blow you away with his foresight and ingenuity.

​Akash (17 years) – Drama Club President, Photoshop guru and gaming geek – this flamboyant and outspoken team player is an avid programmer. Ask him what he wants to do in the future and he will tell you, at great length, of his plans to open his own games and software studio. In fact, even if you don’t ask him, he will tell you, at great length, of these plans.​

Ishini (16 years) – this hands on all-rounder has been working with circuit boards and programing since she was 9 years old. At 9 she built her first remote controlled boat with her dad, who instilled a love of engineering in her at this very young age. At school, she swims, sings and takes lead roles in the school play. She will out talk and out-smart you at any given chance. ​

Vinidu (16 years) – our investigator, sleuth and problem solver is a computer science and physics whizz as well as being as elegant a dancer as you could hope to see. Late at night, Vinidu often finds herself programming and coding complex tasks…or dancing. She looks forward to pursuing a degree in Artificial Intelligence.

All of our team are planning to go to the universities in the Unites States to pursue STEM related subjects for their higher studies.

We chose to have two boys and two girls and representatives of all the communities in Sri Lanka.

Dilum – our mentor, a hard core programmer who runs the School’s Coding Club and a go-kart racer when he is not coding is also an expert in creating and flying remote control Aircrafts and doing Arduino based robotics. Dilum’s knowledge and experience in technology can help our team immensely in making both technical and strategic decisions

We received our kit in May which required us to turbo charge the development of our robot. This required a concerted effort in terms of working on our robot outside of school hours. Starting at 6am most mornings and working until school began and then again after school until late at night, our team also worked over public holidays and over weekends.

Since the chain breaker tool was not shipped with the other items, the team could not afford to wait for the other parts to arrive so they found a way to break and re-assemble the chain safely using some local tools to test out the lifting system which turned out to be a success.

The team also didn’t want to cut out the original pulley cord for testing and prototypes, we tried hard to find a similar one from the local market and succeeded after almost a full day spent searching.

Since we needed a separate room for the robot parts and assembly, we were given the French room. The relocation of French lessons to other class rooms and sometimes having to work in total silence whilst London O/L and A/L exams were going on next door made for a slight challenge to begin with but the team adapted by training ourselves to work and communicate silently, using gestures and whispering softly.  An accidental dropping of a tool broke the silence but it was never loud to disturb the total silence required by the Examinations Board.



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