Vex Robotics Competition - Season Summary

During the 2020 - 2021 Vex Season, A team (3532A) consisted of five members: Kennan (Driver), Lex (Match Programmer), Paul (Skills Programmer), Satwik (Builder), and Hari (Builder), and we also received help from former Vex Director Sai. Due to COVID restraints and issues with finding a facility willing to hold our team meetings, our season was delayed until September. We began our season that fall with meetings at various members’ homes in their backyards, and the majority of our build occurred at the main builder’s house. In the meantime, both of our teams were each given half of the field elements, to construct a quasi competition setting while we waited to find a facility to hold our meetings and practices. Later in the season (around January), with the help of Cinco Ranch High School, we were able to secure a field at the Robert Shaw Center and met there every other week on Mondays and Saturdays, for roughly 2 hours each session, although we were limited to a maximum of 5 members per meeting. The members that were unable to attend a given meeting due to capacity limits (usually programmers or KVA students) spent their time working on autonomous programs. By the end of January, 3532A was able to attend its first tournament, the Robot Skills Challenge Event at Katy High School, where A team participated remotely - we recorded our robot inspection, 3 driver run attempts, and 3 programming attempts and submitted the video unedited. Following a similar process, we attended another Skills Tournament in February (remotely as well). In the following season, we hope to be able to compete in person again and have full team meetings where we can interact with each other and practice together against other teams. We’re also looking into doing various online challenges for programming in the next years for members who chose to stay at KVA (assuming that remains an option for students next school year).

Team C (3532C) consists of 5 members: Aishwarya (Programmer), Rajasi (Programmer), Radhika (Builder & CAD), Ritika (Builder), Laalasa (Builder & Driver). To work around the COVID restrictions, 3532 C followed similar procedures:

• The students that didn’t go to school face to face met on zoom and focused on programming
• The people that went to school face to face met in person at team members’ homes
• Meetings tended to last about 2-3 hours (on weekends)

Throughout the season, C team accomplished the following:

• Brainstormed different build designs and narrowed it down to one idea to build on CAD
• Designed the robot first on CAD 
• Started build in October
• Created a firm base at the start of build
• Then went to build the rollers and intakes using our previous knowledge from last year

C team attended their first tournament in February, a Skills Tournament at Katy High School.