The Washington High School Robotics Club competed in the VEX State Robotics Competition on Saturday, March 27, at North County High School in Bonne Terre.
There were 24 teams competing at the event. Each team is paired with another team as an alliance. In each match, two alliances compete (Blue Alliance and Red Alliance). There is a 15-second Autonomous portion of the match first. During this time, the robots move based upon their programming.
Following the Autonomous portion, an Autonomous Bonus is awarded to the alliance that scored the most points during that time. Then, the students have one minute and 45 seconds of driver controlled time to score as many points as possible. In addition to trying to score points for their respective alliance, team members are trying to de-score points for their competitor's alliance.
Each team competes in five qualifying matches. Team A tied in their first qualifying match and lost the next four qualifying matches to finish 0-4-1 on the day. Team B lost their first four qualifying matches and won their last qualifying match to finish with a 1-4-0 record on the day.
At the end of qualifying matches, the teams move to the Alliance Selection Process for the Elimination Bracket. Only 16 teams move on to the Elimination Bracket. The teams are lined up based upon their finish in the qualifying matches from first to 24th. The team in first place chooses their Alliance Partner first. That team then has the choice to accept or decline the offer. After the first team's selection, they move to the next highest ranking team for their selection. This continues until eight alliances have been formed. Unfortunately, WHS did not place high enough to be able to choose an Alliance Partner and were also not chosen as an Alliance Partner by another team. Washington’s season ended after Qualifying Matches were completed.
The students had a great time. We only had three students attend the State Competition this year. We lost two members to quarantine the day before and two others were unable to make the competition,” said WHS Robotics Club Sponsor Kyle Ellrich. “It was still a great experience for our students. They were able to achieve something that hasn't been done before here at Washington. They were the first Robotics Teams to ever attend a State Competition.
“I am so proud of the time, hard work, determination, ingenuity, and learning that has occurred this past year. At the start of the year, we weren't sure if we were going to be able to have a season at all. In October, we found out we were going to be able to compete and started working on our robots for our first competition on January 16 at the Troy Winter VRC Classic.”
At the Troy Winter VRC Classic, both Team A and Team B both made the quarterfinals of the elimination bracket. On March 9, they were notified that they qualified for the VEX State Competition.
“The students had an ambitious goal of redesigning and building new robots that would perform better at the state competition,” Ellrich said. “They worked hard over the next few weeks to build, trouble-shoot, and code their robots in time for the state competition. They finished the robots just in time for the competition.”
The WHS Robotics Club team members are below. The students in bold were those who attended the State Competition on March 27.
Team A Members:
Samantha Doepker, Darren Armfield, Sam Stewart.
Team B Members:
Evan Richart, Darren Hayden, Isaac Lough, Cierra Loepker.
Below are photos from the Troy competition and the State competition.
State Competition
Troy Winter Classic
