By Amritpal Nijjar
Staff Writer | The Pacific Times
NP3’s Robotics team just rose to 5th place in their latest qualifier round on Friday, Jan. 11, putting them one bracket closer to becoming VEX tournament finalists.
NP3 High School’s two robotics teams build elaborate robots to compete in competitions against other schools.
The two teams are run by Kim Knestrick, and use VEX robotics to build complex machines to use in VEX competitions. Robotics is currently in its second year.
An NP3 robotics team preps their robot for the competition.
The VEX Robotics Competition is a robotics competition for elementary through university students. It is a subset of VEX Robotics, which is in turn a subset of Innovation First International.
The main purpose of the robotics teams are tournaments. There are multiple tournament seasons per year, each lasting four months. Each season’s tournament is similar to a traditional basketball or football tournament.
The majority of competitions are qualifiers, where the team competes in a tournament bracket to advances towards finalist games. Competitions require robots to do various tasks, such as lift and move cones, shoot balls, and park. There’s no winning or losing qualifier competitions, instead you move up or down the brackets. The best teams will play in finalists games to win the tournament.
Last school year, the robotics team also played a competition at Google, where they placed 15th out of 61 other teams.
Robotics students get together after school two to three times a week to plan and discuss new robots for upcoming tournaments.
Team members work on coding their robot.
“It’s such a supportive environment,” said second-year team member Kenya Cedeno, adding that robotics is a good way to meet new people and get involved. “It’s also a great extracurricular to have!”
Robotics isn’t just about making and controlling robots, it’s also about teamwork and friendly competition
“It is very fun when your robot comes together just the way you wanted,” said senior James Ross.
If you are looking to join Robotics for Fall of 2019, go to F-3 for more information.
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.