The Otago Boys’ High School robotics team won the First Lego League national competition in Auckland last week and are on their way to the United States next April to represent New Zealand at the First Lego League World Festival.
The team consists of year 10 students Stuart Scott, Ryder Greig, Declan Gimmell, and their captain Jack Orlovich.
Jack said the theme of this year’s competition was "unearthed" and it required participants to research a problem in archaeology and solve it.
The boys were planning to use 3D printing to make a sort of Swiss Army knife that had multiple archaeological tools for use in the field.
However, after discussions with University of Otago archaeology professor Ian Barber they decided to shift towards printing fossils which would help reduce the impact on sub-fossil and artefact moa bones being used for research.
The 3D print would essentially replace real bones while being examined for research.
The boys were interested in both engineering and the archaeology part of the competitions.
"It started of just a fun side project but we got really into it," Jack said.
He said it was amazing to win the competition and the boys were looking forward to going to Texas and going on a tour of the Nasa headquarters.
Prof Barber said the boys’ research was helping the archaeology programme with some of its work.
The programme wanted to be able to study the bones and other artefacts without causing any impact to them.
The digital imaging and 3D printing technology the boys were using was helping do just that.
"3D imaging is a fantastic method whereby we can retain information, keep looking at the bones and ask questions."
"You fellas are providing us just some great assistance here to explore the technologies," Prof Barber said to the boys.
Archaeological collections lab technician Vanessa Clark said the programme was just beginning to look at the technology to archive some of its reference collections.
"It’s kind of a win-win," Ms Clark said.
The digital print provided a permanent record of the bone.
