About

The Western Blue Tongues are a FIRST Robotics Competition team of students aged 14 to 18, industry mentors and teachers, based at Southern River College (SRC) in Gosnells, Western Australia.

Our story

The team was founded in 2023 to inspire students at SRC to have fun learning high-level STEM skills, which we call Future Ready Skills, through competition robotics.

The first school-based FIRST Robotics team in WA was here at SRC in 2014, and again in 2017 and 2018 as The Collective. They competed in the South Pacific Regional in Sydney in March 2018.

Future Ready Skills

Critical thinking, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity and Community.

FIRST programs

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded in 1989 and its programs for school students run in 80 countries around the world:

• FIRST Robotics Competition (ages 14 to 18)
• FIRST Tech Challenge (ages 12 to 18)
• FIRST LEGO League (primary and early secondary students)

Our impact

FIRST Robotics graduates are widely recognised in industry for the strong skills and hands-on experience they gain designing, building and coding industrial-sized robots with current technologies under the pressure of high-stakes competition.

We promote STEM learning in our community by working with other schools in our district. We work with nine other schools to help them take part in FIRST, offering mentoring and robotics workshops. Our Gosnells Robotics Clubs network has over 170 students from Year 2 to Year 12 doing robotics competition.

How we learn

Our robotics clubs and activities are student led and help develop an innovator mindset. We learn from volunteer mentors who are engineers, business and marketing professionals, scientists and leaders in their industries. Together we explore:

• Maths, physics and engineering principles
• Mechanical, electrical and software engineering
• Business planning, marketing, fundraising, project management, leadership and teamwork
• Computer programming and computer-aided design (CAD)
• Iterative design and an innovation mindset

Our outreach sponsors

We are very grateful to Australian Schools Plus and Google.org for their generous support of our Gosnells Robotics Clubs outreach program over three years.

FIRST Robotics Competition

Read more about the program we compete in, including the FIRST Core Values: FIRST Robotics Competition.