Five teams from Redmond are among more than 2,000 middle school, high school and university students and mentors from around the world, who qualified for the VEX Robotics Competition World Championship, April 30-May 2 at the Dallas Convention Center.
Competitors will show what their robots can do in the game of “Elevation,” played on a 12-by-12-foot square field. Two “alliances,” one red and one blue, are composed of two teams each and compete in matches consisting of a 20-second autonomous period, followed by two minutes of driver-controlled play. The object of the game is to attain a higher score than the opponent alliance by placing cubes into goals and by owning goals having the highest cube in a given goal. Points can also be earned by parking on the platform or by controlling the bonus cube.
The Redmond participants are from Explorer Post 2036 and attend Redmond High School, Redmond Junior High, The Bear Creek School, Overlake School, Woodinville High, Interlake High, or are home-schooled.
Teams headed to Dallas include:
• Team 417: “Team Salsa” and their robot “Block Dude.” Leader: Raluca
Ifrim, plus Tara Balakrishnan, Maya Balakrishnan, Ruchi Ram, Ngoc-Khuyen Thi Tran.
• Team 418: “Team Eye” and their robot “Retina.” Leader: Javid Habibi,
Ashoat Tevosyan, Jonathan Shi, Josh Oratz, Rishi Goutam,
Tyler Nagamine.
• Team 419: “Moving Stairs” and their robot “Otis HYPE.” Leader: John
Davy, Hailey Arnold, Joshua Graves, Kevin Birrell, Mercury Herlan,
Taylor Graham, Tommy Chittenden, Walker Linna.
• Team 420: “Team Secret” and their robot “A Secret.” Leader: Zach
Lovett, Anders Blomberg, Eric Hobbs, Jillian Sehgal, Sam Davids.
• Team 575: “Team Haiku” and their robot “ZippyToo.” Leader: David
Tyler, Micah Zeitz, Paul Cretu, Preetum Nakkiran, Ranjan Pradeep.
Another Redmond-based team that did not qualify for the world championship but is traveling to Dallas with the group, is:
• Team 1899: “Saints Robotics” and their robot “TrashBot.” Leader: Ed
Jiang, Dennis Liao, Franklin Shih, Eric Sun.
The students’ mentor, Richard Tyler, explained, “We are a community-based club that does not have direct financial support from any school or district. This means that our students do it all.”
Through presentations to companies and school support groups, the students raised more than $3,000 in grants. They also sold more than 700 toy “HexBug” robots at $10 each.
Meeting at least once a week, starting in September, they’ve learned to build and program robots. Some weeks, they met four or five times to prepare for important events.
“They learned how to set goals, develop a plan, execute the plan, test their robot and competition strategies and how to take all that as feedback to start over again … (and) learned leadership and cooperation,” Tyler stated.
“Of our class of 2008,” he noted, “all of them went on to college this year. All but two of them are pursuing degrees in math, science or engineering. One of our graduates is studying physics at MIT and another is working on a degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, where he is the only freshman on a project developing a robotic artificial hand. Others are at University of Washington, DigiPen Institute and New Mexico Tech.”
The VEX Robotics Competition World Championship is organized by Innovation First, Inc., and is dedicated to giving students the tools to be innovators for the technology of the future and advancing education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
For information about the VEX Robotics Competition World Championship, visit http://robotevents.com/program.php?offset=70&event_id=1&sortid=8
