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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

GA Robotics VEXes Competition

The GA Robotics Team at the battleground, the Wells Fargo Center.
I have to admit, I was pretty impressed. When I first suggested last year that we join the VEX robotics competition, I was half joking. I never expected everybody to start nodding and drawing out plans from my spontaneous idea. Our team had dabbled in some simple robotics experiments and projects, most notably the Navy’s Sea Perch competition at Drexel, but we had never programmed and built a robot from scratch. Even in October when the materials were sent to us, I doubted we could do it.

The calm before the storm. Click here to see the team in action.
The six of us all consider ourselves good students and great learners, all taking several honors and AP science classes over our four years, but I never thought we would be ready for a project like this. The thing that surprised me was the way everything clicked and soon began feeling natural. We began building our robot, secretly nicknamed Happy Gilmore, from the ground up in November and had a working model in January.
Some last minute fine tuning for Happy Gilmore.
Soon it became natural attaching wires, stripping them, and even bolting odd metal sheets, things I had never seen myself ever doing my senior year. I was proud of our finished product and the first time that I drove, it was almost like seeing your child walk for the first time because it wasn’t pretty. For every turn and movement forward or backward, it meant losing a bolt and screw from the structure. Yet, if attending GA has taught me anything, it’s that success takes failure. And to be truthfully honest, we failed in our first ever Vex Robotics competition. I mean, at one point Happy Gilmore was on his back doing the worm for everybody’s amusement while the other team racked up points against us and our alliance as we slowly lowered our heads in shame. In the end, we built a great robot, programed it to move and stack a block or two on its own, and even beat the Haverford School’s robot, our rival. We placed 6
th and 4th respectively in our next competitions and made it to the quarter and semifinals, surprising everyone counting us out because of our inexperience. It took commitment (including a Friday night before the competition working until 1AM), most of our free periods, and the ability for a chemist, physicist, engineer, mathematician, and cancer researcher to work together to create a living and moving being named Happy Gilmore.
The competition was fierce once it began.
We never saw eye to eye, or even had times in common to work together, but the beauty of GA is that we as students hate to fail. And the sour taste left in our mouths after our first competition drove us to succeed on a level nobody ever saw coming. Not even me.


With our competitive success as a group, we were ecstatic when he heard that next year Germantown Academy will introduce the Beard Innovation Center, which will contain a dedicated robotics field for future teams. After working out of a tiny room all year, we are excited that next year’s juniors and sophomores will have the opportunity to have a full field to practice on, including a room dedicated to design and building to share with other projects next year. We couldn’t be any happier with the results of GA’s first ever legitimate Robotics team. Our team’s inclusion in the Beards Innovation Center’s design is testament to the success we had this year.

~ Abay T. ‘15

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