Vex IQ Robotics Meet

Jack has been participating in his school’s Robotics club after school. Saturday they held their first meet. With varying COVID restrictions, the coaches decided to limit the meet to their own school. They have 14 teams, so there was plenty of matches and trials to fill out the competition!

Once a week since September Jack has been working after school to build, program, and drive his team’s robot using Vex IQ. At the meet they got to put them into action for real points. If they are allowing to hold competitions at other schools in the spring semester, then the top performing teams can attend those as well as regionals. We don’t know the overall scores from this weekend.

From what I could understand, first the kids work in cooperative matches. Two teams are put in the arena. They have one minute to accomplish as many tasks as possible to earn points. The tasks have different difficulties and point values, so there is strategy in planning your goals and building a robot that excels in different areas. For example, hanging off the low bar for 3 seconds seems to be a common goal that about half of them accomplished. (No one got their bot to hang from the high bar.) Each team must switch drivers after 30 seconds (two drivers per team per match). The team both earn their collective points. They do multiple matches during the morning.

There’s another section of the meet where they demonstrate technicals. I didn’t attend this part, and couldn’t quite get a full explanation from Jack, except that he thinks this part is boring. The judges also interview each team member during the day.

Jack’s team did great! Their first round was a little rough. Nerves played a part, I’m sure. Then their bot collapsed during the hang. But their other matches went very well. Again, I don’t have all the scores so I don’t know how they performed overall.

But most importantly, his team won the Judge’s Choice Award! This was given to the team with best collaboration, positive attitude, and kindness not only to themselves but to everyone. I’m super proud of him! Only 4 teams out of 14 got any kind of reward, so it really was an honor to win any sort of recognition.