The Robotics Club at Grace Brethren High School in Simi Valley, Calif., a ministry of the Simi Valley Grace Brethren Church (Jordan Bakker, pastor), has had some success in competition. The students earned an Excellence Award at a tournament in San Diego in December, then they competed in the VEX Robotics World Championship in Anaheim, Calif., in April. This story in this week’s Simi Valley Acorn tells about the club efforts. A portion of the story appears below. Click here to read the complete article.
Grace Brethren robotics students score Excellence Award at tourney
Grace Brethren High School robotics club teammates were eager to show off their latest aluminum-and-steel creation at their after-school meeting last week.
Controlled by a handheld remote, the Team 986A robot whirred across a foam mat on the classroom floor, scooped up half-pound beanbags with a conveyor belt and dropped them into an elevated trough with a built-in robotic arm.
Grace Brethren students Philip Ho, Steven Gandham, Adrian Schemm and Jonathan Kaya worked after school and on weekends and holidays for nearly a year to build, program and field test the robot.
“The thing with design is, you never come up with the perfect design at first, so you always have to modify, rebuild, test and modify again,” said 15-year-old Philip, a ninthgrader. “All these steps were just to improve the efficiency, speed and overall performance.”
The boys’ hard work paid off.
Team 986A’s robot earned an Excellence Award for build, engineering logbook and software programming at a tournament in suburban San Diego in December.
The award allowed the four students to advance to the VEX Robotics World Championship April 17 to 20 in Anaheim, where they competed against student robotics teams from around the world.
The Grace Brethren team made it to the engineering division finals at the VEX world competition and ranked 30th out of the 8,000 teams that competed. The team ranked 19th in the world for programming skills and 54th in robotic driving skills.