The Robotics Club hopes to qualify for the VEX Worlds competition for the sixth time, expand their competition in other robotics fields, and reach out to the community, senior and club president Eusern Ng said.
For competitions, the robotics club is split into three teams this year, which are the VEX, FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), and FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) teams – all split into their own divisions, Ng said.
“Each year, all three of the teams will have a new game, and each team will have to try to build their own robot to complete the purpose of the game to win,” Ng said.
Junior Sriram Sivakumar, the previous VEX lead last year, is now the team lead for one of the new FTC and one of the FRC teams, Sivakumar said.
“The main appeal for FTC is you create your own parts compared to VEX,” Sivakumar said. “While VEX would be more like legos where you use pre-built parts to build the robot, FTC is more advanced, especially with the coding, where you might have to use TensorFlow and AI.”
The Robotics Club has expanded fundraising as a result of more teams, and community outreach, as more members have joined, Ng said.
“The main way we fundraise is through grants and emailing companies and having sponsors,” Ng said. “For community outreach, we like to hold Sinnott Robotics classes with some elementary schools, and we’re trying to expand that to Pomeroy because we are going to reach out to the school board.”
For meetings, VEX Robotics maintains a flexible schedule depending on what the agenda is, starting off with planning meetings and then moving on to build meetings, Ng said.
“At the start of the season, usually we’re adding to and trying to design what the robot would look like,” Ng said. “And then, after we design our bot, we could start getting the pieces together during build meetings, which we usually do at someone’s house.”
This year, VEX Robotics has tried to be more organized as a whole compared to last year, sophomore and vice president Justin Chung said.
“Last year, we didn’t really have a set house to do meetings at,” Chung said. “So what I made this year is a Google Sheet with all of the planners for meeting times and we also found one person’s house to do build meetings.”
Overall, the best part of robotics is the communal aspect, during meetings and competitions, Sivakumar said.
“We play music during meetings, and it’s really chill and really fun,” Sivakumar said. “You can talk to friends, you can become friends with the whole team, and we even went to Baskin Robbins all together after the last competition. So yeah, it’s pretty fun, not just the building and coding parts, but also just being part of the team”.