DBS VEX Robotics Teams at the Bangkok Scrimmage

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It was the first event of the season for our DBS VEXIQ Robotics teams last Saturday. We took 5 teams to compete in the friendly Scrimmage at St Andrews International School in Bangkok. The event has grown enormously over the last couple of years and it hosted around 60 teams from Thailand and Vietnam this time. It’s always a great experience to meet new teams and find out how their students have created their robots for the challenge.

In short, each team must design and build a robot to score points in a competition. This year the main challenge is all about moving different sized blocks around to score them in goals. There are several aspects to the competition. The main event of the day is the Alliance Competition where two robots are driven by teammates, using a remote control, working together. There is also a Skills competition, divided into two rounds; the Autonomous round in which students have written code and pre-programmed the robot to move by itself and the Driver Skills round where just one team drives the robot to score the points for their team.

Although this was just a friendly competition, the standard was really high. Our teams were well prepared and had developed fantastically engineered robots to take part in the challenges. We had a great deal of fun, interacting with the teams from other schools and making new friends. All our teams had some tough matches and luck wasn’t always on our side! Two of our teams did an amazing job though and scored enough points in the qualifying matches to advance through to the finals. In the Alliance Competition our Elementary Team 55580D came in 5th place and our Middle School Team 55580E came 7th. Team 55580C was in 9th place in the Skills Competition but they secured the top score of the day in the Autonomous Round. Well done to all the teams that took part and we know they are eager to make a few improvements to their robot designs and match strategies in preparation for the Thailand National Finals in February.

If your child is interested in being in a DBS VEX Robotics team in the future, please encourage them to sign up for one of our VEX Robotics ASAs on Wednesdays in term 2 to get some experience and develop the necessary skills.