Three Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) teams recently qualified for the VEX Robotics World Championships to be held in May in Dallas.
Two of the three teams that qualified for the championship round received top honors at the North Central Florida VEX Robotics Competition.
Eastside High School’s “Drumroll Please” team won the VEX V5 High School Tournament Champions Award at the competition, which includes nearly half the districts in Florida. The team members included Aidan Badea-Bondoc, Michael Soukarov and Henry Kaufman and was coached by math teacher Brittany Wishin.
The Eastside team also won the Amaze Award in their division. According to the Robotics Education and Competition (REC) Foundation, which manages the VEX robotics programs, “the Amaze Award recognizes a consistently high-performing and competitive robot.” The V5 division is for 8-12th grade students who build, program and compete with metal robots.
Westwood Middle School’s “PHAZE” team took first in the V5 Middle School Tournament Championship Award and the Design Award, which “recognizes a team’s ability to document and explain their engineering design process through an engineering notebook and team interviews” (DEC) The PHAZE team, coached by robotics teacher David Sankey, includes team members James Cerullo, Orlando Kernaghan-Ruiz and Calvin Guthrie.
A second Westwood team also qualified for Dallas. The team “We’re better-er-er-er” won the Create Award in the VEX IQ Middle School division, which involves robots made of plastic. The Create Award is an automatic qualifier for the world competition and “recognizes a creative engineering design solution to the challenges of the competition” (DEC). Team “We’re better-er-er-er” includes Logan Knudson, Sonty Valverde and Grayson Wilkins.
Congratulations to these fine students and to the great school system that produced them, and best of luck to the teams.