At the Southern New England Championship at Walsh Middle School the iRaiders VEX team “C” became Tournament Champions and will go to World the Championship in Kentucky! Four middle schools seventh graders met every Wednesday for two hours in the lab at Melrose High School to build a robot that met all the requirements, little did they know the youngest team would pull of this victory.
The iRaiders had a fantastic day at the Southern New England Regional VEX tournament. The three robots A, B and C finished 15th, 23rd and 4th respectively out of the forty-eight teams competing! It is important to mention that each of these robots had an outstanding performance. During the season the team won the prestigious “Excellence Award”. This award was given for overall excellence in creating a high quality VEX program.
As a way to explore a new platform the seventh graders were given the task to build a new robot from scratch, simply as a setup for next year. Each student participated in building, programming, driving and scouting at the competition. The competitions are set up in a series of matches in which two alliances of two teams each randomly compete against another alliance which the VEX “C” team
This was their first VEX competition and each vocalized how VEX was different from the First Lego League competitions they participated in during elementary school. Adam Nagar said, “it was more intense because you had to actually drive the robot yourself” and Liam Brown added, “With FLL you knew what was going to happen, but with VEX it was more dependent on you”. However, they felt lucky that their robot did so well at competitions due to its structural integrity.
The Melrose robotics community gives our warmest congratulations to all of the robots on the VEX iRaiders and we are all on the edge of waiting to see what they do at the world championships!
If you would like to support the iRaiders VEX team and their trip to the World Championship you can donate on Edco using the link below.
http://tinyurl.com/y279jgws