Introducing Northern Ireland's New Basketball Star: A Robot
Move over LeBron James and Michael Jordan, a new basketball champion has emerged—though this one was created in Lisburn, not Los Angeles or Chicago.
Known as 25416, this basketball-playing robot may not be a household name on replica jerseys, but it excels at shooting hoops like no other.
The robot secured first prize for Friends' School in Lisburn at the UK-wide First Tech Challenge robotics competition.
The team of sixth-form students from Friends' School outperformed 47 other schools from across the UK at the event held in London's Copper Box Arena.
18-year-old Aaron Poots, a member of the team, expressed his enthusiasm about the project.
"I 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,"
Aaron explained that the theme of the 2026 competition was essentially 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,"
'Teamwork is the Main Focus'
The team dedicated hundreds of hours to designing, building, and programming the robot, according to Aaron.
"There's no one person on this team who knows how to do everything,"
"Really teamwork is the main focus."
He added that creating a standout robot capable of scoring hundreds of points per game was no simple task.
This required the 'drivers' controlling the robot to be "quick on your wheels," Aaron noted.
"It is exciting, it's not ten nerds in a room! It's a full arena, it's a pretty big thing,"
Jonathan Gillespie, also 18 and a fellow team member, described how each participant found their specific role in the robot's creation.
"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,"
"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 also noted that many of the competition games were closely contested.
"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,"
Sharing Passion for Robotics
18-year-old Rebekah McCullough, another team member, has been actively promoting robotics to other schools in the region.
"We invited a number of primary schools to our school for a workshop that we hosted,"
The workshop allowed younger students to interact with robots pre-programmed by the Friends' team.
"They really enjoyed that and we really enjoyed being able to share our knowledge with the children,"
"It's such a big sector and there's so much involved that you can do, there's so many aspects that you can go into."
"So it's really great that we can share our knowledge of what we've learned and hopefully share our passion as well."
Achievements and Future Prospects
The team's trophy is prominently displayed at the front of their maths classroom at school.
They won the competition shortly before sitting exams in subjects including maths, technology and design, physics, and software systems development.
While their academic knowledge contributed to the robot's development, the timing of their A-Level exams means they will not participate in the European final in the Netherlands, which takes place in June.
The European final coincides with their crucial exam period, preventing further competition.
