On Friday, February 2nd, 2018, my Exploration group went to Thailand in order to attend the VEX Robotics Competition in Bangkok 2018. VEX Robotics Competition is a competition that requires the student to work as a team, using their engineering skill to design and build a robot to play against another team. It is a game of alliances which mean we will require to cooperate with the other team(s). It came with a lot of rules that we must follow in order to avoid from disqualification. We’re a team of five girls named “Beta-B“.
On Saturday, we went to NIST International School to join the VEX Robotics Competition. We went through many challenges throughout the whole competition. Before the competition, we spend a lot of our time getting familiar with the real field to fulfill the practices that we’re missing because our school doesn’t have the field.
We discovered that our cortex (robot’s brain) isn’t working very well. The Bluetooth is always disconnected with the controller. So we decided to risk changing it with the extra cortex at NIST, although we didn’t know for sure if it working well. Before getting to make everything work, we’re running out of time because we must go to lunch altogether. What worse is we are one of the teams who will compete in the first round and we really don’t want to miss it in order to keep our score as best as we can.
After lunch, we rushed back into the working room, and we weren’t allowed to get in until 12:45 pm. We were freaking out, and feeling hopeless because the competition will starts at 12:50 pm. But because of the good teamwork, we get to make everything done on time and we get to attend every round in the competition.
Finally, we end up at the 11th place. I was really surprised that a lot of teams want us to be their 3rd alliance. But we choose to team up with the top two team; the 1st place “Shadow Corruption” and the 2nd place “VEXecutioners” where they really want us to be their alliance as well. This is where my favorite part of the competition begins. We collaborate so well that we win every game smoothly and we’re getting into the final and compete with “Team A++” and their alliances.
This is the video of the whole competition. You can watch us compete in the final (the 2nd round) by move the video forward to this minute, 4:54:15. As you watch the video, you will soon discover something wrong right after we finished the game.
Although we met some issues during the final game, we still get through it well and end up winning the competition and receive the Tournament Champion award!
I had learned a lot from this experience. It isn’t just learning how to design and create a robot, but also how to collaborate with other people as well. I understand that to build a good robot, it doesn’t need to have every function but what important is that it has a function that works super well just like the one we built. If there’s a VEX Robotics Competition next time, I would really LIKE to join it again!