The VEX and FTC robotics teams have had a busy start to their season, attending their first few tournaments of the year and showcasing strong performances.
All five VEX teams attended their first tournament on Oct. 13. A month later, on Nov. 16, three teams, 95071X, 95071V and 95071R, competed in their second tournament of the season. As a result of its performance, team 95071X, the school’s strongest VEX team, has now secured a spot in the State Championship. Members of this team are freshman Daniel Yeh, sophomore Krisha Muddu , junior Bryan Zhao, junior Richard Lee, junior Alec Guan, junior Adit Sharma, senior Alex Yaung and senior Luke Zhang.
Two out of the school’s three FTC teams have also attended their first tournament of the season — the Bettafish team won the Connect Award in a tournament on Nov. 17 for their excellence in promoting STEM through community outreach, and the Jellyfish team led their alliance to the finals of their tournament on Nov. 23.
One VEX team secures a spot in the State Championship
The tournament on Oct. 13 was held in the SHS gym, where all four of the school’s teams competed. 95071X placed 29th out of 47 teams after their qualification matches, and during the elimination rounds, they lost in the round of 16 playoff to teams 16800A, a team from Palo Alto, and 95070E, from Redwood Middle School.
However, the judges deemed their robot to be the best designed among all of the teams at the competition, and they won the Design Award.
On Nov. 17, teams 95071X and 95071R attended the “Bay Area High Stakes VEX V5 Robotics Competition #3” in Palo Alto, where team 95071X won the tournament and team 95071R made it to the first elimination round. Meanwhile, 95071V competed in a separate tournament in Tracy, where they advanced to the finals and won the Innovate Award for their robot’s unique clamp design.
95071X’s strong performances through their high placements and winning of the Design Award have now secured them a spot in the State Championships.
“We’re really excited for the rest of the season now that we’ve qualified to States, and I believe that our team has the potential to win there and even potentially at the World Championships,” said sophomore Krishna Muddu, who is the team’s drive coach and hardware lead.
The FTC teams attend their first tournaments of the season and win three awards
The FTC Bettafish attended their first competition on Nov. 17. They placed 13th out of 16 teams and won the Connect Award, which highlights strong team development plans and interactions with the engineering community.
Some of the outreach through which the team won this award was hosting a speaker series where STEM professionals talked about their careers, holding robot demos where elementary-aged kids could drive a robot around and running a CAD (Computer Aided Design) workshop at Saratoga Library where they taught kids how to use TinkerCAD.
For their speaker series, the Bettafish invited Arindam Guha, chief strategy officer at UCT (Ultra Clean Technology). The company specializes in developing semiconductors used in everyday technologies like computers and smartphones. Guha gave an informative talk about the semiconductor industry and explained how his company operates within the rapidly evolving field.
Guha also took the time to share his personal journey, describing where he started and how he worked his way up to his current role. He provided valuable life lessons on risk-taking and perseverance, offering insights that members could reflect on and apply in their own journeys. Attendees walked away with new perspectives on project management, as well as inspiration for pursuing STEM careers in the future.
“We applied these lessons directly into our season, particularly in how we divided tasks more efficiently and streamlined communication,” sophomore hardware lead Katie Yang said.
The next weekend, on Nov. 23, the MSET Jellyfish competed in their first tournament at the FTC Bellarmine Qualifying Tournament at Bellarmine College Preparatory. They won three out of five of their qualification matches before advancing to the elimination bracket, where they led their alliance to the finals, before ultimately losing to the first seed alliance.
Their placement won them the Finalist Alliance Captain Award — an award reserved for the captain of the alliance that made it to the finals but lost the match. They were also awarded the second place Inspire Award.
With these two awards, MSET Jellyfish showcased a strong start to their season, but they just narrowly missed out on qualifying to the NorCal Regional Championship.
“Even though we missed out on qualifying to NorCal, I’m actually very pleased with our performance as a team. Next competition [on January 26], we have a lot of changes coming, and we plan to get a lot of driver practice in, so as a team, we’re feeling really confident,” freshman Aryan Swamy said.
The school’s final and most experienced FTC team, the three-time World Championship qualifier MSET Cuttlefish, had their first competition on Dec. 8 at the Google Building MP3 in Sunnyvale. In this competition, they were finalist alliance captains along with team 11311 Paragon. To their disappointment, in the finals match, their hang mechanism cracked and they lost the final match by 14 points. However, the team qualified for the regionals by winning the Inspire Award, an award given to the teams determined by judges who ask questions about the teams hardware, software and outreach.
