India has always supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics but the criticism has been that the education is too theoretical. More recently, there is a welcome shift towards making these more practical, fun and experiential. In particular, robotics competitions, catering from elementary schools to colleges, have been one of the fast-growing ways of addressing this. We provide a first-hand account of 13-year old in the US who, with four other kids, went to the World VEX Robotics competition in April.
This is a first-person story of our journey as a 5-person middle school robotics team, named ‘Team 5×5’ competing in the Global VEX IQ: Next Level competition. Why 5×5, you ask? It is because we love competitively solving the Rubik’s Cube and there were 5 people in the team.
VEX global challenge
The VEX competitions start at the local/regional level and teams that do well move up to the state, national and world championships. The 2019 World Championship that just concluded saw more than 400 teams from 40+ countries competing for the title.
The objective of the VEX 2019 challenge is to use robots that a team builds from scratch to score as many points as possible on a globally standardised table.
Each competition has 2 parts – ‘driving runs’ involving controlling the robot in real time – like a remote-controlled car and ‘programming runs’ where the robot follows a set of instructions – using software called Robot C – to do all the tasks by itself. The competition also has two other components. One that stresses on partnership and working as teams towards a common benefit. A computer randomly pairs teams from around the world and the two sides have to work together to score as many points as possible quickly analysing the strengths of each team’s robots, strategising how to jointly tackle the table runs, etc.
The second additional component is a STEM research project. Vex asked the teams to come up with a STEM solution to a problem that relates to maths. Vex Team 5×5 focused on creating a tool called “The School of Einstein”, that focuses on teaching maths to kids who have learning disorders.
Throughout the competition, teams document their entire robot-build, software development, engineering solutions, etc. in an engineering notebook to help the judges understand their thought processes over the several months and how things kept evolving.
Diversity in people and interests
Our team consisted of 5 students aged 10 to 13 from 3 families. Mariam and her brother Yusuf, Jensie, my twin sister Preeta and myself (Pranav): so, 3 girls and 2 boys. We split the roles based on interest and strengths: building the robot, programming, project presentation, etc.
At each level – regional, state, etc. – we had to redesign the robot and add new features, coding and timing so that there were constant improvements. Competition at each higher level was tougher and so what got success in the earlier rounds wasn’t good enough anymore.
Making to the World Championships felt like an achievement in itself. The Vex IQ World Championships was a 3-day event. Teams were put into divisions and there were 5 divisions, each with about 80 teams.
In the end, we were delighted to come in the top 20 overall in the World Championships the extra special achievement was winning the first place globally for the robot design award: for the engineering involved and the explanations around that.
The competition itself was intense, competitive and a lot of driving and practicing but so much fun. The stadium had thousands of people, a parade like the Olympics, lights, smoke and music and provided for making friends from around the world. Those were separate awards in themselves.– Pranav Swaminathan, from Chicago
