Multiple V5 robotics teams from The Frazer School have earned the right to compete in the VEX Robotics World Championship after strong showings in the VEX North/Central Florida High School Regional Championship on Feb. 14.
The Frazer School was among 32 other teams that competed in the regional championship, which took place at Steinbrenner High School in Lutz, Florida. Of the 120 high school teams in North Central Florida, only 36 qualify for the regional competition, according to a press release, while only 12 advance to the VEX World Championship.
This year’s V5 challenge is “Push Back.” The purpose of the game is for teams to score as many 18-sided blocks as they can into four goal-shaped tubs. Every team gets an opportunity to showcase its talent through a series of tasks, including a driver skills challenge, an autonomous programming challenge, a 2-on-2 tournament and an extensive judging process that includes a detailed engineering notebook and team interview by a panel of judges.
Team Geen House (George Li, Avery Moran, Bhuvan Naru and Garrick Wu) won the Excellence Award – the highest award possible at any event. The release said the team’s combined engineering notebook, interview score, skills ranking and qualification ranking were all considered when selected for the award.
Joining Green House is Team Invictus (Robert Ceobanu, Nick Chronley and Miles Snead), whose skills ranking, the release said, allowed them to also claim a spot in the world championship.
Other Frazer School award winners at the competition included Team Zeno (Lucas Chen, Sylvia Guo, Ivan Kory and Issac Trillo), which won the Sportsmanship Award, and Team Magnus Turbius (Connor Guthrie, Keerthi Karri, Jay Kim and Sean Kim), which won the Judges Award.
According to the release, The Frazer School and Timber Creek High School (Orlando) are the only two schools in Florida to send multiple teams to the world championship this year.
“We learned a lot from our first year in V5, and that experience helped our teams keep up with the top teams in Florida this time around,” Frazer School Robotics coach Steve Yu said in the release. “The hundreds of hours that each of these students has dedicated to their craft has paid off. I couldn’t be more proud of them!”
The VEX Robotics World Championship will take place April 21-24 at the America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where the top 800-plus teams from more than 80 countries will compete for the title of World Champion.