Cape robotics team heads to world championship for third straight year
After winning the Delaware State VEX Robotics Championship March 10, the Cape Robotics team heads to the VEX Robotics World Championship for the third straight year.
Comprising seniors James Harrod, Ulysis Slagle, Megha Patel and junior Yuxin He, team Cape Xiwang bested 23 other teams from Delaware and Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore to earn the overall Excellence Award for the second year in a row. The team also received the Robot Skills Championship Award.
“‘Xiwang’ means ‘hope’ in Chinese,” said He, who proposed the name.
Teams were scored on their engineering notebook and interviews, programming and driving skills, and each team had to qualify for the robot competition finals. Cape students previously won the Sussex County Science Fair based on their research, and the team is competing in the Delaware Valley Science Fair over spring break.
“It’s their machine – they put it all together with a lot of good engineering design. I was really proud listening to them speak to the engineers during the competition. They really know what they’re talking about. They have a great future ahead of them,” said Cape science teacher Bill Geppert.
Geppert started the Cape Robotics program as a club in 2007 and developed it into a course for the 2010 fall semester. Cape now offers Robotics I, II and Advanced Robotics, courses that expose students to computer programming, electricity and electronics, mathematics and physics. Cape started competing in the VEX competition just four years ago.
The competition provides educational and competitive robotics products to schools worldwide to encourage student interest and proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, careers. The company’s middle and high school competitions pit more than 18,000 teams from 40 countries against each other in 1,350 competitions worldwide. Each year’s challenge is different; this year, students had to program their robots to perform certain tasks balancing speed and power with efficiency in the confines of a 12-by-12-foot playing field.
Each student has a different role and responsibility in the competition. Mechanical engineer James helped construct the robot, christened “Messi Bot” after Ulysis’ favorite soccer player, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. Ulysis pilots the robot, while Megha is programmer and notebook keeper, and Yuxin captains the team. The robot and its base went through several alterations before it was competition-ready.
“We found steel was too heavy, so we learned aluminum was just as strong but lighter and easier to maneuver,” Patel said.
This year’s VEX Robotics World Championship takes place in the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Ky., from April 25 to 28.
“We went the last two years, so we know what to expect this year to analyze the game and win the point,” said He.
When not competing, Cape students can network with other students and agencies like NASA, and with corporate reps from tech companies like Dell, Texas Instruments and Google who sponsor the competition and provide scholarships to up-and-coming STEM innovators. Count the Cape Robotics team among those future pioneers: James plans to major in computer science, Megha in marine biology and Ulysis in mechanical engineering with a possible concentration in aerospace engineering. As a junior, He has time to decide on either mechanical or aerospace engineering.
“We have a need in society where we’re not producing enough innovators,” Geppert said. “It’s fortunate the district allowed me to create this class so students have the freedom to organize, plan, fundraise, participate, practice and learn from their success and failure through the design process.”
