Emma Narvaez
After two years of COVID-19 restrictions, the Saint Maur Robotics Team was finally able to participate in the VEX Robotics Competition hosted at ASIJ on January 13 to January 14, 2023. There were 22 teams that competed in this year’s competition, involving schools from Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United States. The VEX Robotics Competition is an annual program which presents students with a game that their robots will compete in. The competition allows students to exercise their engineering and programming skills while learning lessons of communication, perseverance, and teamwork as they collaborate with their team to build their robot. This year’s game was called the VRC Spin Up, which is a head-to-head game consisting of two alliances on each team. The objective of the game is to win as many points as possible through scoring discs in goals, owning rollers, and covering field tiles by the end of the match.
For four months, the Saint Maur High School Robotics Team met once a week after school for two hours to design, build, and innovate their robot. They came prepared for the competition with three different robots named Perihelion, break;Exception, and Synapse. Well, maybe not fully prepared. Eisuke (G10), a member of the Perihelion team stated:
“When we first entered the arena, on the bus to ASIJ as well, it was really, really stressful. We were expecting to rank 20 out of 22 because we did not have a robot. But then the moment we got there, we knew we had around 6-7 hours to build an entire robot and to bring something to the competition…Throughout every round we started putting more additions to our robot and at the very end, it became pretty strong.”
On the first day of the competition, after 20 qualification matches, Perihelion was ranked 6th, break;Exception was ranked 17th, and Synapse was ranked 18th out of 22 teams in total. The following day of the competition held ten more qualification matches and a knockout tournament to determine the teams that would qualify for the VEX World Championships. The final result came with quite some shock. Perihelion ranked 3rd! The team built their robot the day of the competition; how could this be? Was it luck? Or just quick strategizing? Eisuke believes in the latter. He explained:
“It wasn’t actually luck. At the beginning, I think there was a slight bit of luck on how we were able to get a good alliance team who had the abilities to score points so that we had offensive methods and defensive methods. But before even knowing who our teammates were, our strategy was just to defend and destruct.”
Mr. Payne, the supervisor of the Saint Maur High School Robotics Team commended Eisuke for his driving skills, as he believed it was a major help in their success. Eisuke stated:
“No, [I didn’t practice my driving skills], I just started driving and held the controller so that it was comfortable and I also play a lot of controller games so when I took the controller at the beginning I connected all the buttons on the controller so I knew which buttons were which. I set it in my own type of comfort of position so it was really easy to control the robot.”
Eisuke would like to shout out his team members Victor and Tiger who allowed his team to accomplish third place.
“They [Victor and Tiger] were basically our robot’s mechanics. While I was driving during the competition, I played really aggressively and tried to block the opponents and just keep smacking into them to make them miss their shots. And throughout those bumps, there were a few times when our screws would loosen and pieces would fall out…But during the break time of the competition matches, we would use that time to fix our robot and Tiger and Victor would save me.”
He would also like to shout out his alliance team called Killingly Robotics from Connecticut.
“Their number was 78889K and also their other teammate 77889M were really nice and gave us good advice at the beginning of the match. The people on the K team picked us to become their teammates so we strategized together to reach a pretty high position.”
Additionally, the Perihelion team also won the Sportsmanship Award! This award is presented to a team that is notably respectful and helpful to everyone at the event. The Perihelion team interacted with other teams with a spirit of friendly competition and expressed enthusiasm throughout the tournament.
Overall, our High School Robotics team represented Saint Maur incredibly! Through this tournament, each member utilized their engineering and computational skills and also got the opportunity to interact and strategize with STEM students from all around the world. It is evident that all three teams: Perihelion (Hippolyte, Tom, Victor, Eisuke, Jan, Tiger), break;Exception (Ryo, Jun, Jacek, Lijun, Kai, Yoshito, Heesoo), and Synapse (Alex, Joshua, Jashwanth, Arata) dedicated long hours of hard work into their robot. Congratulations to the Saint Maur Robotics Team!
Emma Narvaez