The Chittenango Central School District is proud to run the most awarded program in New York State for the 5th year in a row, with 31 awards this season prior to the Northern-New York State Championship, a Vex Robotics Competition (VRC) Regional Tournament. Teams from organizations around the world compete in a 2v2 style game in a 12×12 square foot field, with student developed robots, and each organization can have multiple teams.
Matches are divided into two parts for every tournament, with a qualification round that determines a rank, and then an elimination round with a typical elimination bracket with up to 16 seeds. Not all teams typically make it to the elimination round, because you can only use as many as your bracket fits. If there are enough teams, then teams are split up into multiple divisions before the start of the tournament, and each division competes independently. The only difference with division is that the winning alliance of each division goes on to compete against each other in another round, before one of them can go collect their tournament champion award.
There is an event at each tournament called skills, which is a minute-long show of a team’s skill in driving and programming, where the team having the skills run are the only people with a robot on the field. The field setup for skills is typically different from the match setup.
The Vex World Championships is a set of events spanning multiple a week, that include: Vex IQ Robotics Competition – Elementary School and Middle School levels, Vex V5 Robotics Competition – Middle School and High School levels, and Vex U Robotics Competition for University students. We have sent a team to worlds each year for the past 5 years, and we’ve sent two teams a couple of times. This year 7157B Mystery Machine is the only Chittenango team to make it to the World Championship, but the rest of our outstanding program is working hard to help them prepare.
The tournaments and awards brought home are the results that most people see, but it takes a lot of work behind the scenes just to bring a robot to a competition, and a lot more to excel. Robots have to be designed, built, programmed, tested, and practiced with, which is a process that is repeated over multiple iterations of a robot. Different roles and tasks are split up between multiple members of a team in order to achieve an objective, and the most efficient development cycles are those where each member can complete their tasks extremely well without worrying about too many other parts, since they are being handled by their teammates. Although teammates stay in communication with each other during the process, and don’t always stick solely on a subset of tasks, since it often helps to have input from others, it’s typically what they focus on. An example of this would be the design of a robot, done in Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, which may be done by one or two members of a team, but discussion about the design happens between all members, since each one’s input is valuable. Every team member is also expected to contribute to the documentation process, in their team’s engineering journal, which usually has an overview, process or daily updates, and whatever information the team deems necessary to document.
The best robots have been well practiced with, often keeping the same frame or formfactor for the entire season as Mystery Machine did, and this always held true. There have been many great teams, even ones that dominated as the Firebreathing Bears did a few years ago, but without proper practice even Chittenango’s most successful teams have lost, ironically some of these tough losses have been to other Chittenango teams.
