Robotics Team Travels to Wayne
by Montana Ruppert
The Robotics team traveled to Wayne Wednesday, October 18, to compete at Wayne State College against teams from Battle Creek, O’Neill, and South Sioux City. The two teams from Pierce finished in 5th and 6th place.
This year’s RoboJays are made up of two teams. The first team, Me Me Strong Bot, has four team members: Cody Fuchs, Alexander Kesting, Matthew Williams, and Trevor Zellmer. The second team, Better Vexpectations, has five team members, Emilia Goetsch, Alex McKeown, Kyler Peters, Caydan Retzlaff, and Mark Venteicher.
“In the Zone” is the name of the VEX Robotics competition for 2017-18. Robots are built using VEX materials, and the beginning size requirement of the bots is 18 x 18 x 18 inches, which can be expanded once the competition actually begins. Competition plays out on a 12 foot x 12 foot mat that contains 80 cones scattered throughout. The competitors’ robots must stack on low and high goals and move goals to scored zones. Two competing teams form an alliance, and they face another alliance for each round of the competition. Points are scored for various achievements during the autonomous period and the driver-controlled period. In addition to the high school teams that competed against Pierce, college teams from Northeast Community College also competed in their own division.
The format of competition contained two practice rounds followed by nine qualifying rounds, and from there, the teams were seeded for finals based on how they performed. Each team selected its alliance partner based on the qualifying performance.
Pierce’s Me Me Strong Bot team finished 3rd in qualifying, and Better Vexpectations finished 6th. First-placing Battle Creek chose their alliance first and selected O'Neill. The other Battle Creek team, who finished 2nd, selected the other Battle Creek team for their alliance. Then, the team from Pierce that placed 3rd was allowed to select their alliance and chose the other Pierce team for finals. Pierce lost the opening round, which was a best two out of three match, to the Battle Creek teams’ alliance. Both rounds were close with the final round score of 31-33. This put Pierce’s RoboJays in 5th and 6th for the day.
Coach Treva Dostal said, “Team members were continually working on making their robots better throughout the day. They have already begun the rebuild process to make the robots even more competitive for the December competition.”
The next competition will be Friday, December 1, at Northeast Community College at 10:00 a.m.
