Following my victory at VEX Worlds, I became the head mentor and captain of the VRC program at Singapore American School. The team featured here would go on to make some new achievements at VRC and have a run at VRC Worlds. Among those achievements they would make finalist for the Girl Powered Online Challenge.
When I first did VRC in my 9th grade, there were only 2 functioning teams and a leadership team of informally involved mentors. Under my leadership, the program would grow dramatically in both the number of committed learning teams and the mentoring ability of the leadership team. Today in SAS' VRC program there are 10 teams of 5 and 7 mentors.
The goal of the VEX Tipping Point game was to score points by maneuvering mobile goals, balancing them on a seesaw, and scoring donuts in the mobile goals. 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.
While I had been the first to use CAD effectively in the VRC competition at SAS, no one else in VEX knew how to CAD. I decided to lead the way in making CAD part of the standard robotics design process at our school. I made sure to dedicate at least 10 hours a week (outside of the lab) to Zoom calling with mentees to teach CAD and got everyone to the point where they could at least CAD a VEX drive base.
Another new development for mentoring at SAS was the emphasis on the engineering notebook. I held team members extremely accountable to documenting their entire design process. This led to this team creating an elaborate 300+ page engineering notebook. I would review their notebook, give comments, and expect the team members to refine their work.
For their first robot this team made an X drive base, with 2 claws mounted to a lift running up linear slides. The robot had the ability to grab and place 2 mobile goals on the seesaws to score points. I worked with the team refine small details to make the robot incrementally more efficient, then to simply spend a lot of time practicing to drive with it.
The simple design was pretty good for the driver skills version of the game, but when the team later found out they would be competing in the co-op version of the competition at Worlds, they had to develop a new design.
The team did not quite manage to qualify to the World Championship on their own. However, with my Excellence Award win the previous year, I had an automatic qualification for a team to the event. I decided it was more important to train up new members in the program and opted to pass on my ticket to this team.
Following that, they made a robot that relied on pneumatics to still be able to carry 2 mobile goals and had a donut feeder to open up the ability to score points with that method. The team built 2 pretty similar designs so that they could practice driving with one while they fine tuned the other robot to optimize efficiency. Sadly one of the robots developed some robot-destroying cracks in the primary tower which stopped it from working all together. The other robot was taken to compete at the World Championship.
This team came very close to qualifying to the VRC World Championships by Online Challenges. Notably, the team would make finalist for the Girl Powered Online Challenge, and finalist for the Career Readiness Online Challenge. 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.
Overall the team had a blast at the World Championship. This was the first World Championship we had all experienced in person given COVID-19 regulations had just lifted.
The team was inspired by this impactful event with most of the member returning the following year to serve in some kind of mentoring capacity.