Dungog High School students have won the Hunter Robocup Junior competition

Isla Briggs and Blake Chant blew away the competition with their design, construction and programming of Lego robots to perform their presentation Haunted.

"We were originally going to do a moon scene or something like that but then we thought we need something that's a little bit more realistic that we can do easily," Blake said.

Haunted consists of four separately programmed robots driving and using their limbs to operate different Lego creations.

One robot uses a pulley to control a ghost and another controls a skeleton hand that beckons you into a haunted house.

However, the main attraction is when one robot, known as 'Big Brother', rescues its little brother from a robot monster chasing them.

The idea of a haunted house came from Isla. "I could easily build a haunted house. For like three years running our house has a haunted house," she said.

Due to COVID-19, the competition was held remotely with the duo having to submit a film showing their performance.

They created the majority of their performance just one week before they had to submit due to a number of complications throughout the process, including a group member leaving and changing ideas.

"We had a couple of little errors in our coding but we ended up figuring it out," Blake said.

"It was all things we could fix, except our teammate pulling out," Isla said.

In order to participate in the competition and finish their project on time, the students stayed back after school and used their lunch times to craft their performance.

After finding out they had won, the duo were stunned to see their work pay off.

"I was dumbfounded. The next morning I told my parents about it," Blake said.

"It was good to see that all the time and effort we put in paid off," he said.

The experience with the Robocup Junior competition has inspired both Blake and Isla to continue robotics and coding throughout the rest of their high school education.

Teacher Gillian Manning brought the competition to the two students and encouraged them to participate. She said their win was an opportunity to put Dungog High School on the map.

"I really think it puts our school on the map given that we're a small, regional High School," she said.

"There are other schools from Newcastle and some private schools as well, it's great to see that our students can compete and participate at the same level."

Ms Manning said the competition gave the students an opportunity to learn these skills in an increasingly technological world.