On March 3rd, 2024, Colon Parenthesis robotics team participated in the state robotics competition for Vex IQ. There were 18 teams in total and 8 awards to win. We won the Excellence award, Teamwork award, and Skills award. Out of the 18 teams, only 3 get to go to Worlds. Our team, called Colon Parentheses, or 🙂 for short, qualified for Worlds after winning the 3 awards at states. The competition was located in Farm Bureau in Doswell, VA.
The team members of Colon Parenthesis are Calvin L, Makayla C, Matthew C, Colin H, and Christian Y. 3 of these students were from the team last year. 4 of the 5 students are 8th graders.
Calvin and Colin are our main drivers. Makayla and Matthew are our main builders. Matthew and Christian are our main programmers.
The game is called Full Volume and lasts 1 minute . The objective of this game is to pick up as many green and purple blocks as possible and dump them into one of the 3 buckets. There are many bonus points that you can get from knocking down the red blocks off their podiums, parking your robot into the supply zone, putting only one color per bucket, and many other bonuses.
Our robot can intake both green and purple blocks very quickly. It then falls into our outtake bucket which sorts the colors. We can outtake one color at a time for each bucket. This helps us get the color bonus in the buckets.
“It was really fun watching us improve from last year to the beginning of this season to now.” Colin H commented. “I really enjoyed looking at the other teams and learning from them.” Makayla C added.
Overall, Colon Parenthesis 🙂 robotics team is doing very well this season and are going to the Vex IQ World championships in Dallas, Texas. We aim to get to the finals in Worlds and get into The Dome, which is the final competition, where the best teams in the world compete.
