The Elmira High School Robotics Club was formed in the fall of 2014 by 8 students and their advisor, Mr. Smith. These students met once or twice, and sometimes 3 times a week to work on building and programming a robot for a regional competition put on by the GST BOCES at the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center. In our first year, the robotics kit was supplied by GST BOCES, and transportation to the event was secured by a grant. The team competed in the event on January 12, 2015 and finished third in the individual event, third in the collaborative team event, and won first overall out of over 30 teams from seven area school districts!
The team resumed in February to begin planning for the next competition. The team decided to change programming languages and took on the challenge of learning the language, and incorporating more sensors with their robot. We also started to mentor a team of 8th and 9th graders from Ernie Davis Academy. The teams again met for up to 5 hours a week to prepare for the competition. On May 27th, we returned to the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center determined to repeat as champions. The event had grown to almost 50 teams from 9 school districts, and this time out the team took first place in the collaborative team event, and finished second overall!
The Next Step – State Qualifiers, State Championships, & World's
The team is making the leap to compete in the VEX Robotics Competition, which has more than 16,000 teams from 40 countries playing in over 1,350 tournaments worldwide. This competition differs from the regional BOCES competition in that teams design and build a custom robot to compete directly against other teams in a game-based engineering challenge. The team will be participating in one or more regional state qualifiers, most likely in the Syracuse area, with the goal of qualifying for the State Championships, also held in Syracuse. At the State Championships, the team will attempt to qualify for the World Championships, held in various cities throughout the US.