By Thereasa Rasmussen
Friday, January 6th The Weiser High Vex Robotics Program attended their first competition of the season. This competition was hosted by Ridgevue High out of Nampa. Due to time and space this competition only permitted four teams to compete per school. Weiser High has eight teams and Mr. Jon Lundberg, the Robotics teacher at Weiser High, held an end of semester skills test to decide which teams’ robots were best to compete in this first competition. Teams 9551A, 9551B, 9551C and 9551E were selected to attend the competition. Lundberg shared that he knew none of the teams were quite ready to compete, but he knew that having his students get to a match and compete would really help them to learn and come back with ideas and solutions for their own robots.
This year some of those teams were in real time working on and changing their robots right at the competition. Ryan Glenn from team 9551C shared, “Not everyone is ready with their robots this year. It’s a really challenging game this year. We have Frisbee Golf, Territory and Rollers that we can all potentially score on. It’s a lot to try and score on and difficult setting up your robot to do all those things. Our robot isn’t working perfectly just yet, but we are getting there.” One of the way’s Weiser noticed other robots gaining Territory points was to shoot strings or small ropes from their robot in the last ten seconds of the game, “Quite a few robots have strings attached to their robots. It shoots them out and how every many tiles they are touching increases their score,” stated Glenn.
Only two of Weiser’s teams, 9551A and 9551B, made it past the qualifying rounds into the bracket rounds, but Weiser walked away with a better understanding of how this seasons challenges and scoring options worked and overall the teams felt that they had a good base of information and ideas to take home to implement in their robot designs. Glenn commented that he felt it was worth coming, “Absolutely, yes! I am glad that we came even with our robot not quite ready to go. It’s helped me notice ways I can improve our team’s robot.” He shared his teams plan and how they would like to try and build their robot to be able to score for every scoring scenario, “At this point in time our robot is essentially just a push bot, but next we are working on being able to high goal (Frisbee Golf), then we are going to try for more Territory and then work on implementing the ability to get Rollers.” Weiser Robotics will get the opportunity to see if their knowledge gained from this event will pay off at their next competition January 27th at Vallivue High in Nampa.
