Entered my second robotics competition towards the end of 1992, the National Science Fair held in Victoria Junior College. From a personal point of view, it was a very inaccessible place, being located along some obscure stretch along East Coast Parkway. My favorite spot in the school was a shady tree just outside the podium, in the center of a roundabout next to the football field. Though I must've looked like a holy man sitting cross-legged under a tree in the middle of a road.
Robotics was only but one of several different categories in this Science Fair. Interesting to see various Chemistry, Physics, Biology and other projects whilst wandering around. We were assigned the teacher's bench in a certain Chemistry laboratory, such that our robotics model was the first you'd see on entering the lab.
The name of our project was the Tutankamen Unscrambler, a Lego model that unscrambles puzzles. Basically we had eight wooden blocks fitted into a nine-square grid. On each wooden block we secured a small piece of soft metal and pasted a fragment of Tutankamen's picture over it, such that when the puzzle was unscrambled, you had King Tutankamen glaring at you. Spooky.
At the top of each wooden block was a thin strip of black-and-silver foil, which was actually binary code to enable the robot to identify each individual block and to fit them accordingly into place, piece by piece, using its magnetic robot arm. The magnetization/demagnetization process had to be very precise for the blocks to fit into the frame of the grid.
After spending days making presentation after presentation to busloads of schoolchildren and mucking about with the chemicals tucked away in the bench cabinet, the judging panel finally dropped by into our lab. Won us a Gold award, one of only two given away under the Robotics category. Just as well nobody ever discovered the rapidly evaporating chemicals ere our departure.