Back row: Owen Delee, Guiermo Morales; Front Row: Michael Eads, Zacc Hutchings; Not pictured: Lauren Wiegand
A Plymouth High School robotics team is in Louisville, Kentucky this week, competing at the VEX Robotics World Competition. Team 586A has qualified for its third trip to the World Competition, where they will be one of about 500 teams competing.
Jason Doody is a recent Plymouth graduate and is now one of its robotics coaches. He says the first objective for Plymouth’s A team is to succeed in the qualifying round. “They have five divisions, and so there’s 100 teams in each division,” he explains. “And basically, they have to first qualify to go into the tournament. For the first two days, they do qualifying matches, which is basically where they have a random number of matches and depending on how well they do, they get to move up to the tournament if they’re chosen. And then they play the tournament, and so the tournament winners of each division then go up against each other in the finals to see who is the overall winner of VEX Robotics.”
For the robotics teams, preparing for competitions is a year-long process. Doody says each year, Plymouth’s teams begin working on their robot as soon as the previous year’s World Competitions are over, “It’s usually all summer and then all school year. So they spend a minimum of about 300 hours working on a robot.”
Earlier this month, the A team competed in the U.S. Open Robotics Championship, coming in 24th place after qualifying and advancing to the quarterfinals. At last year’s World Competition, the team finished 22nd in their division and failed to reach the tournament round.
As for the transition from team member to coach, Doody says he’s enjoying his new role. He says coaching is a lot less stressful, compared to the pressure of winning and having to make sure the robot is ready for competition.
Click here to watch a live webcast of the VEX Robotics World Competition or to view updated results.
