Mentoring for VIQC Design Award Win

The Legendary First Team I Mentored

The first team I ever mentored went on to be the first ever Singapore American School team to compete at the VIQC World Championships (technically I had qualified the previous year, but the competition was cancelled due to COVID-19). At the World Championships, they won the second highest judged award, the Design Award. From there, this win supercharged the program, allowing for a dramatic expansion., Inspired by a high school student mentor who coached me, Rohit Narayanan, I formalised the philosophy of giving back. Since the feat, the VIQC program at Singapore American School has grown significantly: The first year I mentored the program, there was just me, a single mentor, and 3 teams. Today, it boasts 6+ mentors and 6 teams. The SAS VIQC program has also managed to qualify to the VIQC World Championships each year since then, but has not yet topped the Design Award win.

VIQC 2020-21 Under Onerous Covid-19 Restrictions

The goal of the VEX Rise Above game was to manipulate and stack risers. Each team designed and built unique robots, documented the process and trained in driver and autonomous modes. For more details check out the game video.

In Singapore, there were onerous lockdowns (fines and prison time for contravention) during early COVID-19 with restrictions on school activities and home visitations. Traditionally a program in school, we had to start the season at a member's home. While this story is about one specific team I mentored at the time, I was also mentoring 2 other teams at separate locations. Later on when COVID-19 restrictions tightened further, I was not allowed to meet the team in-person, so I mentored them virtually.

Mentoring to Build Skills and Confidence

In my first year of mentoring, I started at the position of head mentor of the VIQC program. The previous head mentor, who founded the program with me, had just graduated.

COVID-19 ended up having a few benefits. Because COVID-19 limited travel, the school VIQC teams were itching to get started with robotics. I called up the school teachers and had the school's field and parts transported to a member's home in June. Then, we got to work right away.

A previous problem in SAS VIQC teams was inconsistent documentation. I overcame that by holding the team fully accountable to documenting their design process. This had the added benefit of pushing the team to be more organized and intentional when making design decisions, as they would have to justify such decisions in the engineering notebook.

First and Second Robot: Trying Two Ideas at Once

Photos of the First Robot Being Built

Photos of the Second Robot Being Built

To start, the team had two separate ideas that they wanted to try out. I tried not to give overarching advice about what kind of design to make, and simply taught skills and broke down problems to help them try out their ideas. This resulted in them building two different robot designs simultaneously to figure out which design would do better.

The first robot featured a triple reverse 4 bar with 2 claws. This design was chosen since it would in theory allow the robot to pick up risers and triple stack for the favored scoring method.

The second robot took inspiration from the VRC 2019 game that had to do with stacking. The robot would collect risers in a tray on the robot. Then it would push an arm, straightening the tray to stack the risers in the goal.

I took the team through reflections on how to improve their designs, or if they needed to change course entirely. Looking over the problems, such as gearing the triple reverse 4 bar with enough torque to properly lift, and picking up risers efficiently with the tray design, the team realized that going for something a lot more simple and straight forward might be a good idea.

Third Robot: A Simpler Design

Photos of the Third Robot Being Built

This robot featured two sets or arms, each fitted with a claw that could grab risers. This allowed the robot the grab 2 risers at a time, push a riser into a goal, and stack the other 2 on top.

I worked with the team to refine the design, optimizing things such as the gear ratios and length of the arms to maneuver the risers to score quickly and the claw styles to be able to grab risers with a lot of room for error on the part of the driver.

With this design, the team competed at the Caution Tape Classic Ontario Virtual Competition, for which I had secured an invitation. The team won the Judges Award at the competition.

Then the team competed at the Singapore Regional Event, winning the Robot Skills Champion award. This qualified them to the World Championships.

While the team found the design worked really well, they wanted to innovate and try something new. They decided to present a new design for the World Championship.

Fourth Robot: A VIQC X Drive Base

Photos of the Fourth Robot Being Built

For their 4th robot, they did something that was unheard of in the VIQC competition, by making a functional X drive base. Normally, such a decision is not smart since the standard VIQC robot uses 2 motors on its drive base and then uses the remaining 4 motors on mechanisms. The team figured that the added mobility of an X drive base (which requires 4 motors) gave their robot a special edge in the competition, and found a way to still stack 3 risers at once with the remaining 2 motors.

The team decided on a single arm with a special claw at the end. The claw could pick up 2 risers at the same time if they were already stacked on top of each other, which meant using a strategy to first double stack before creating a triple stack on top of a goal. This meant that the driver had to make efficient use of match time to make up for the additional steps required, so they practiced driving consistently every day leading up to the World Championship.

CAD of the Team’s Design

The team also CADed the first VIQC robot in SAS's history. Admittedly, the CAD was used simply as an exercise to learn the skill and was made after the robot was built. However, this exercise sparked their interest in real CAD for high school robotics later on.

Online Challenges: Qualifying for Worlds a Second Time

On the side, the team had been competing in Online Challenges before they knew the results of the Singapore Regional Event. For these types of Online Challenges I pushed the teams to iterate their submissions, by reviewing their work and grading it as if I were a judge using the provided rubrics. Then, I provided feedback on how I thought they could score higher. This team went on to win the VIQC STEM Research Project Online Challenge, making a submission on how sensors could solve the problem of electrical fires. Winning the challenge equate to earning a spot at Worlds.

This makes them the only team in SAS history to have secured a double qualification ticket to a World Championship event.

VIQC World Championships: Design Award Win

Despite the team's best efforts, I knew realistically they had little chance of winning a top skills award, like Robot Skills, so I made a call. As I had pushed them throughout the season to maintain an accurate and up to date engineering notebook, I figured their chances faired pretty nicely for judged awards.

To prepare the VIQC team for the World Championships, we practiced interviewing. I would play the judge, ask questions, made sure the members took turns talking and paced their answer's properly. Then I would give detailed feedback on their technical content. We practiced the interview until it seemed natural, flowed smoothly, and all of the important technical content was crammed in the short 10 minutes the team would get.

Ultimately the work paid off and the team won the Design Award, the second highest judged award at the event. This is partially due to how well the interview well and also due to their elaborate engineering notebook. The team even had a good showing on their skills side (just short of winning a skills award) despite my ambivalence. A video showcasing their robot in action can be found here.

At the conclusion of their great success, I wrote a school newspaper article describing their win.