Courtesy of Nathan Sandland
Ben Sandland, from left, Aaron Kang and Philip Oberhart recently qualified for the VEX IQ Robotics world championships.
Three local boys recently participated in the middle school VEX IQ Robotics competition in Dublin and emerged victorious, earning a Create Award at the state championships and a ticket to the world championships.
“So when we qualified for states, I was just really proud, and I was quite surprised that our team was able to beat most of the other teams in California because we had only come together for about a few months, and this was our first time doing VEX,” team member Philip Oberhart said of the March event.
The partnership between Mountain View resident Philip, who attends Bullis Charter School, and fellow middle schoolers Ben Sandland (Ocean Grove Charter School) and Aaron Kang (Cupertino Middle School) of Los Altos began when Ben – taking classes from home – decided to form his own team because he could not form one at school.
As the trio began the build process, they had a lot of logistics to consider.
“One challenge was finding an available time where all three of us could come together and work on the robot together, because in the first few months when we started building this robot, the schedule was kind of scattered,” Philip said. “It was taken very casually, but then as time moved on, we became more serious about it and then we started actually trying to plan out times when we could come together as one group.”
In an effort to facilitate their meetings, Ben’s father, Nathan Sandland, acted as the team’s coach. He and the other parents worked together to arrange team meetings and help the boys stay on course amid the pandemic.
“Probably almost any eighth-grade (and seventh-grade) boy is, especially when you get multiple of them together, pretty rambunctious,” Nathan said. “I think setting clear goals for not necessarily focusing on long-term goals but the short-term goals, and what is it that we need to do before that competition and helping them see that there were things they needed to do immediately in order to make it to those goals, was a good solution to that.”
Budding engineers
Each boy had his own motivation for completing the robot. Philip and Aaron, for example, wanted to have a place to channel their creative energy and compete with other like-minded individuals.
“I’ve been in the robotics (world) since the summertime of last year,” Philip said, “and I just enjoy robotics because I like all the different types of things that robots can do, and all the different types of things that we can try and make robots do, such as make certain things or pick up different types of items.”
The VEX parts used for the state competition are similar to LEGO bricks, but with more long, conjoining pieces. Trying to accomplish their goals with such a robotics setup proved to be a lesson in trial and error, Ben said.
“At first, we decided maybe we should go with a scissor lift and so we built it,” he said. “It was very big and it was very heavy. ... And so we moved on to our second idea and that was a forklift, a multi-stage forklift. We saw the idea in an older group of robotics. And we thought that was a great idea. And then we implemented it into plastic VEX parts. It took a while, but we were finally able to make a stable forklift, which was quite hard.”
Other than the construction itself, the budding engineers had to work on the programming side of the event, as one of the competition modes was autonomous, with the team relying entirely on code.
“Our programming is very, very long lines of code; especially for autonomous, it has to say every single command that it’s going to do,” Ben said. “And one special thing that we used in our programming was called ‘functions,’ and they would do a list of tasks – like, say ‘lift riser’ a certain amount, and we could use that multiple times, but it was a lot. And so we just put in a function and that function becomes a little block and then you can put it in there and the code looks much cleaner.”
Problem solving
While the team ultimately decided not to go to the world championships after discovering that the format was altered to accommodate the pandemic, the boys said they still got a lot out of the experience. They learned how to handle setbacks and keep moving forward despite them.
“After (a step in) the competition where we completely failed, we started to think about what happened and we tried to identify a problem,” Philip said. “We felt pretty bad about it, but then after that, we decided, well, OK, this is just one fail, and we’ll have a second chance in a few months. So, from in between that time and the next competition, every once a week we would meet together as a group, and then we would try and fix that bug (having to do with) the autonomous program.”
Aaron added that robotics is something he plans to pursue in the future.
“I think I’ll definitely proceed (with robotics) in high school because I don’t want to be stuck with math, doing math all day,” he said. “It’s definitely better to code, make robots; definitely helps more than just doing that.”
For more information, visit vexrobotics.com.
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May 12, 2021 at 05:17AM
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Three local middle schoolers qualify for robotics world championships - Los Altos Town Crier
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