While wandering about a mall recently, we came upon a delightful sight: multiple teams of middle school and high school robotics students practicing for the upcoming state regional and New England region VEX Robotics Competition. Assisted and mentored by a team of volunteers from a local community college STEM club, the teams had an opportunity to use their robot designs on a real competition course. Their robots performed in two ways during a 2 minute challenge period, once in autonomous mode (performs on its own’ and the other in manual control mode to achieve the most points while performing specific tasks according to the scoring rules of the competition. During the real thing, teams will compete and be judged according to the scoring laid out by the rules of this year’s competition. Preparation sessions help everyone get ready for these intense competitions. A range of design approaches and results can be seen in this video outtake.
Good luck to all the competitors in this fabulous annual STEM robotics event!