Robotics Team Makes History

Robotics Team Makes History

May 20th, 2016 by Abbey Fitzpatrick

For the 1st year of having a Robotics team, no one would have expected the team to make it this far. On April 20 , the Sandy Creek Robotics team will be competing in the National Championships in Kentucky against some of the world's best robotics teams. In the beginning of the year, the team, originally named Sandy Creek A but now named C.o.R.E ( Competition Robotics Engineering), was fairly mediocre and in the middle of the pack, says Mr.Degone who is the team's coach. But the team started standing out at the Baldwinsville Competition, when they won the Championship and Judges Award. The Championship Award goes to the winner of the competition and the Judge's Award goes the team that shows the most outstanding talent and effort. After that point the team just kept winning and eventually went on to win the State Championships, which led them to Nationals later this April.

The competitions are held from around 7am to 5:30pm, it's practically all day. At each competition there is about 30-40 teams that randomly get teamed up in teams of two in 9 qualifying rounds. When the teams get parried up, they essentially become allies and work together to move on in the competition. Once the teams are matched against each other they compete to see what two bots can make the most baskets. So basically it's like basketball just adapted for robots and the highest scoring team wins. In the game, there is two different types of balls and goals. Balls are either orange or green; the orange ones are worth more than the green ones. There is also two different goals, a low goal and a high goal, the high goal rewarding more points than the low goal. Each round last approximately 2 minutes. The first 15 seconds of each round are fully programmed and the robot is not operated/controlled by anyone, but after that the robot is either controller by one or two people to make baskets. The winner of the round wins 2 out of the three games in the round. After the 9 qualifying rounds, there are 2-3 quarterly rounds, then 2-3 semi-final rounds and 2-3 final rounds. For the Sandy Creek team in particular, there is two drivers for the robot, Senior Andrew Olin and 8th grader Logan Hatch. The robot was also programmed by Sophomore Oren Mcdougal and Andrew Olin. The teams accounts and records are written by Zeke Durham and TJ Harding was the team's scout who assisted in communications with other teams and made allies with teams for the final rounds.

If you would like to read more about robotics and/or competitions you can go to : http://www.vexrobotics.com/

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