Students heading to Louisville, Kentucky, next week for competition
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EVANSTON — The Evanston High School robotics team is heading to Kentucky next week for the VEX Worlds Robotics Competition.
The team qualified at Wyoming’s recent state competition on Feb. 25.
Their story actually started five years ago when EHS started the robotics program in Wyoming, teacher Stewart Parry said. This year marked the fourth annual state competition, bring 11 teams from around the state.
The championships are structured around a specific problem that students must set out to solve, and this year’s challenge was to build robots that could get 14-inch cube bean bags and jacks over a 3-foot fence. Students have to build the robot with the strength, balance and dexterity to perform the task, as well as write the program that directs the robot. The EHS team’s goal was for their robot to be both quick and strong.
The contest is judged by robot composition, professional traits and the engineering process. For the first parts of the competition, teams are set up in pairs — that is, two teams compete against two teams. By the elimination round, two Evanston teams and two Kemmerer teams were left.
The students explained that, with the team pairing setup, the teams want to be able to work with each other to beat the other team pair’s score, yet the pairs are also competing against each other to get the higher score.
By the end of the competition, Team 6822B had qualified for worlds and took away the tournament championship with the Tournament Champion, Excellence and Judges’ awards.
There were some technical difficulties at state, but Colton Hatch (the team captain for the team going to the world championship) said the robot that will go to worlds versus the one that was at state is very different and much improved.
While the teams are waiting for the championship, they are preparing by making strategies, fine-tuning and testing their robot, practicing driving and fundraising. For their fundraising, they are raffling off a drone and asking for sponsorships. Their GoFundMe page can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/lnyypy7. Those who want to follow their work can also find them on Facebook at EHS Robotics or see the state championship on YouTube at http://tinyurl.com/l788qtc.
Parry said this will be Evanston’s third time at the worlds championship, and he believes this will be their best year out of the three.
