On February 9th, Seymour High School had two teams awarded for excellence at a local robotics tournament.  The Midwest Princesses, an all-female team, made it to the quarterfinals and were awarded the judges’ award for their positive attitude and mentoring of younger Vex IQ teams. Team 31330C achieved the design award; the judges stated that they had clearly organized and effectively demonstrated concepts throughout their notebook. I’ve talked to some team members over the tournament, and the following are their responses.

Leo Holle, team member of Team 3133oC, first shared their inspiration for the design: “Our team’s design for the robot was inspired by a combination of past seasons’ designs that worked out successfully along with mechanisms we see during competitions this year. We then improve and modify those designs to better fit our needs.” He then explained the design process: “During the design process, we started by brainstorming ideas for our build. Once we have a vision for what we want to build, we replicate it on Fusion 360, a CAD modeling website. After getting the design onto the computer, we built and tested until the mechanism worked.” He also shared that the most challenging part of the design was the building since “it took a lot of trial and error. We knew it was only a matter of time before we perfected a certain aspect of the robot, but it was still tough going through certain failures during building and testing.” When asked what aspect impressed the judges, he expressed, ” The feature that we believe impressed the judges the most was probably the mechanum wheels. Our mechanum wheels, which allow us to move in 8 directions, are very innovative, and we have won two awards for that reason in the past. The wheels are truly one-of-a-kind, proved by the fact that we have been the only team using them at all of our competitions, therefore leaving an impression on the judges.” Some advice he’d give to teams aiming to win the design award is “to thoroughly document the design process into their notebook and look for opportunities to innovate. A team’s engineering notebook is essential to win such awards because the judges review the notebooks along with the robot to decide the winner. Innovations are also significant because they stand out and give the judges a reason to keep reading through the notebook.

Dafne Dominguez from The Midwest Princesses, who had the strongest showing of the day, commented, “Making it to the quarter-finals was one of the most exciting moments of the competition. Our team didn’t start well, placing poorly in the early stages. As the day went on, our rank rose to 4th place. You should have seen us; we were jumping up and down with excitement. ” She also shared what she thought made the Midwest Princesses special, “Most teams are made up of either all boys or a mix of boys and girls. Except for us, our team included five girls, which makes us unique.” She also shared some of the tests they faced and how they overcame them: “In the past, our team didn’t do so well at these competitions. Our robot wasn’t even complete, which prevented us from scoring highly. We worked hard and improved our strategy to achieve better results at these competitions. Before the competition, our team morale was low, as we had previously placed last. So we weren’t expecting to do so well at this competition.” She added, “During the competition, our team moved as a group. As we competed, we talked strategy with our alliances. Communication is vital to the competition, so communicating within our team and our alliance is crucial .” When asked about specific strategies during the competition, she stated, “There weren’t any particular strategies that helped us move forward. Our main goal was to place relatively high while having fun. Throughout the competition, we recognized a pattern within our matches. In the matches where our alliance relied on us to score and play offense, we underperformed. In the matches where our alliances relied on us to play defense, we succeeded. Recognizing this pattern led to us mainly playing defense while relying on our alliances to dominate the offensive aspect of the match.