Budding tech wizards won a prize for the most ruggedly-built robot at a global championships.

Merchant Taylors’ School dominated the leader boards at VEX Robotics World Championships in Dallas Texas, taking seven of the top ten spots in a contest sponsored by NASA, Tesla and Google.

Representing the UK, they competed to build a robot which could perform a variety of tasks, including racing around a court to collect balls and score by throwing them into baskets

MTS_Myopians’ robot, driven by Watford's Jai Elangovan, 14, won the world BUILD award for the most outstandingly engineered machine.

Watford Observer:

Jai said: “It was an incredible experience and we all learnt quite a lot from it right from the start. We didn't start the competition in the best of places, but we gradually worked our way up the table and managed to win the BUILD award.

“I think it was because of our robot being solid and really durable, as well as our teamworking in building and repairing the robot.”

The teams reaching Dallas had been whittled down to 800 out of 32,000 that started the season,

The Northwood school boasts a dedicated design block on-site, and the school sent four to the world qualifying stages for the world championships from May 3 to 12.

Jai said students learnt more than just technical skills.

He added: “Also being in a foreign country and meeting new people, we would get paired with different countries and could learn about their cultures, we were paired with a few American teams, a Canadian team and a team from Taiwan.”

Watford Observer:

Head teacher Simon Everson said: "We are incredibly proud of our VEX Robotics teams who represented the school and the UK with such distinction at the World Championships in Dallas.

“All four of our teams performed extremely well and to win the overall BUILD Award was an outstanding achievement.”

Jai’s father Prashanth Elangovan said: “They have the most incredible DT block. It will blow your mind. They’ve been focusing on this, and they’ve got an incredible DT team.

“We watched the livestream every day. It was impressive and really exhilarating. The competition level was something else!”