On Nov. 20 and 22 some students from Carihi’s Robotics Class went to Shawnigan Lake School to partake in a VEX Robotics Competition.
They participated in the “Nothing But Net” game where teams consisting of three robots faced off attempting to launch, push or grab balls and get them into nets in order to score points. Carihi sent down two robots.
The first robotic team consisted of Bailey, Harley and Nathan.
They had ran into issues getting their robot finished in time for the competition and ultimately had to borrow another team’s robot (Which was built by Linus and Nigel).
There were problems with the programming for the robot but they were unable to fix them due to the laptop not functioning properly.
Another issue was that the robot they were using launched the balls at such a rapid speed that it almost always overshot, they were able to shoot the balls all the way across the gym! Despite these challenges they were able to make it through the qualifiers (six games with random teams) and into the quarter finals.
Their first match was against the second team going into quarter finals, while they were the seventh team going in.
During their final match they were able to score two high points which required extreme precision due to there not being a back wall.
Ultimately, their team didn’t make it past the quarter finals but they still finished in an impressive eleventh place overall.
The other robotics team was Quinn and Jeremy. Despite best intentions, they had misread a few rules and their robot was illegal. While they attempted to quickly rebuild the robot, they didn’t meet much success since it’s incredibly difficult to do something that usually takes weeks in a matter of hours.
They had to settle for simply using their robot as a “pushbot.” Due to their unfortunate situation, their team was unable to make it past qualifiers.
Now they are hard at work, using what they learnt from this competition to build better robots to take to Comox in the New Year.