Photo provided Smith Elementary’s Sonic Cyborgs pose for a photo at the VEX Robotics World Championship competition in Dallas.
An elementary school robotics team has returned home after competing at an international tournament.
Smith Elementary’s Sonic Cyborgs competed at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday. Teams at the VEX IQ Elementary level were split into 10 divisions. According to STEM teacher and coach Lisa Haines, the Cyborgs came in 23rd in their division, which was made up of about 75 teams.
While local team did not advance to the division or overall finals, they ranked 112 in skills out of about 700 elementary teams.
The team will be recognized at Monday’s Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. school board meeting, at Columbus North High School at 6:30 p.m.
Haines said that the team made “amazing connections” with students from all over the world and represented Columbus well.
“It was really fun for the kids to be able to compete on a world stage,” she said.
When asked what he got out of going to the world championship, 5th grader Samuel Schneider replied, “More information about technology, partnership, social skills.”
This year’s VEX IQ Competition game is called “Slapshot.” Points are scored by getting robots to unload discs from dispensers, launch these discs across the field and stretch across fences to touch “contact zones.”
“Two robots compete in the Teamwork Challenge as an alliance in 60 second long teamwork matches, working collaboratively to score points,” the rules state. “Teams also compete in the Robot Skills Challenge where one robot takes the field to score as many points as possible. These matches consist of Driving Skills Matches, which will be entirely driver controlled, and Programming Skills Matches, which will be autonomous with limited human interaction.”
Competing at the world championship marks the end of the Cyborgs’ first season, and Haines said she “couldn’t be prouder.”
Moving forward, the team plans to take some time off, though they are looking at holding some small sessions over the summer to prepare for the next challenge.
“We would also like to expand the number of teams at Smith,” said Haines. “I’m not sure what that’s going to look like, what numbers that’s going to be, but the interest in robotics is incredibly high right now in our building, as you can imagine. The kids back home were watching the kids in the competition on their SMART Boards in class. We were getting texts throughout the day from members of the community.”
