Middle School Robotics Club Members Qualify for Regional Championship

On February 1, the Middle School Robotics Club competed at the Pantego Christian Academy VEX IQ Robotics Tournament. Competing in a field of 27 teams, each team performs for two categories of the competition, the robotics skills portion and the teamwork challenge, to score as many points as possible in this year’s game.

The Robotic Rizzlers, a team consisting of Noel Cumming ’31, T.J. Smith ’31 and Addi Souvoravong ’31scored the highest in robotics skills, with Cumming’s autonomous program scoring the highest of all of the teams at the competition. In the teamwork challenge portion, The Robotic Rizzlers had the highest score in the final rounds, qualifying them for the regional championship on March 1.

“I’m really proud of all of our teams,” said Middle School Robotics Club Sponsor Jamie Ringgenberg. “They put in a lot of effort and adapted to a steep learning curve. They showed a lot of resilience, teamwork, and sportsmanship and made me proud to be a Falcon.”

Additional highlights from the competition are below:

• The Purple Monkeys (Tyler Ferguson ’31 and Emory Chu ’29 ) finished in sixth place in the qualifiers and fifth in the finals.
• The mCdOnalds EmployeE nAmed TARs (Mars McWaters ’29 and Gareth Teoh ’29) finished seventh in the qualifiers and sixth in the final round.
• The Color Crusaders (William Cobb ’31, Mason Prince ’31 and Gio Hernandez ’31) finished 10th in the qualifiers and fourth in the finals.

How the competition works:
In the robotic skills portion, a team performed by itself to score as many points as possible in this year’s game. They had three opportunities to drive and three opportunities to run their autonomous program, adding the driver-controlled score with the highest autonomous score. 

The teamwork challenge composes the bulk of the effort at the tournament. In the teamwork section, two teams take the field with their robots, and they work together to maximize the number of points they can get. Each team had eight qualifying matches where they were partnered with various teams, and the scores from those matches were averaged to determine a ranking. The top 20 teams advanced to finals, so there were 10 finals matches. In the finals round, each team was paired up with another team that performed comparably to them in the qualifying matches. The finals were a winner-take-all scenario, so the two-team alliance that scored the highest in the finals round won the tournament.