Four WACC Teams Going to Indy for Robotics Competition
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Four robotics teams from Warsaw Area Career Center will travel to Indianapolis Saturday for the Warren VEX Toss Up robotics competition. Paul Zakaria, WACC engineering and technology teacher, said, “It’s a local competition with each robot’s objective to score as many points as possible by putting balls into a bucket with their robot. They can go to state by winning the tournament.” In the tournament, teams duke it out until there’s eight teams left. The top eight teams then will compete against one another, but each team picks two other teams – not already in the final eight – to be in their alliance for the duel, Zakaria explained. The top team, along with the two alliance teams it picked, qualify for state competition. Warsaw is taking four teams to Saturday’s competition, with three students on each team. While there are 30 students in Warsaw’s robotics club, Zakaria said they only take the teams to competition that are ready to go. In the past two weeks, Zakaria said Warsaw has had teams make it to semi-finals and finals in competition. For this weekend’s contest, more than 60 teams will be vying to go to state. “It’s a fairly large competition,” he said. “Just making it to finals could be just enough to get to state because it’s so large. It’s just a great way of engaging students on the weekend. It helps them with their math skills, engineering skills and soft skills like teamwork.” Senior Alexi Demopoulos said this weekend’s contest is the same as the other competitions so far this year. However, compared to previous years’ contests, he said it’s tougher because the competition is a hodgepodge of prior contests. For the Warsaw Robotics, Demopoulos said they’ve set standards among themselves for teams who can participate in competitions. To enter a contest, a Warsaw team has to achieve two of the three standards. Those standards are that a robot has to be able to hang for points, it has to have an autonomous part and a team has to be able to compete effectively with its robot, meaning score more than 20 points. “It is a lot of money (to compete),” Demopoulos said. “It is a significant amount of money, and we don’t have any sponsors right now so we have to raise the money ourselves.” For Saturday’s contest, he said the entry fee is $100 for the first team and $75 for every team afterward. That’s $325 for the four teams Warsaw is taking Saturday. “It adds up a lot,” he added. Despite the cost, Demopoulos said he’s really excited about the contest this weekend because there’s a variety of robots from Warsaw going. Each one has its unique twists and concepts. “I’m expecting not only our robot to do well personally, but all of the (Warsaw) teams to do well,” he said. Demopoulos said with Warsaw teams doing well this year, that’s exciting for them. It shows other teams that Warsaw is a team to contend with, and that Warsaw teams are using advanced robotics and technology. “We can say we’ve gained experience and this is where we’re from,” he said. “Our robots over the years have gotten bigger and better. Four of our teams have six-arm bar lifts. A few years ago, we didn’t even know what that was.” While he admits he would love to win state competition and advance to world competition, Demopoulos said he has a different perspective this year because he’s a senior and a leader. He now has a large responsibility not only working on his team’s robot, but also helping other teams. Demopoulos said it’s nice to have Nathan Kiphart, Paul Motter and Josh Miller around, too, because he trusts them. He knows they will work hard and are a great group of guys who will take it seriously. “It’s great having them on my team,” Demopoulos said. Junior Grant Monsma said his team was adding on a couple functionalities Wednesday. They were trying to make their robot more durable and run smoother. They upgraded their program and replaced some damaged parts. He said they’ve also practiced a lot with their robot. “(The hardest part) probably is keeping the robots in good shape because they like to fall apart. It takes a lot to maintain them,” Monsma said. “We have a good chance of qualifying for state or nationals ... It’s a big competition so we have a good chance.”
