On November 28th, 2015, Ridley’s VEX Robotics team traveled to Woburn Collegiate in Scarborough, for the first VEX Robotics tournament of the season!
After a long day and what seemed like in inordinate amount of mechanical failures, Ridley’s teams 1509E (James Gross, Jim Yang and Joey Bao), 1509 (William Wang, Padraic Odesse, Andy Li and Anakin Li) and 1509Z (Ryan Schmidt, Elias Ancer, Will van Sittert and Antonio Aspite) waited to see if they would be selected as an alliance partner for the elimination matches. Each team had dueled it out in the round robin with six matches each in a field of 72 teams. 1509E and 1509 wound up with similar records of four wins and two losses, and 1509Z wound up with a 1-5 record, facing an extremely tough draw of four of the five best opponents in the tournament.
When alliances had been built for quarter final play, 1509E was a member of the 3rd seeded alliance and 1509 was a member of the 6th alliance (out of eight) and faced each other in the quarter finals. The good news was that whoever won the quarter final match would qualify for the All-Ontario championship in late March. The bad news was that the other team would not qualify. As it turned out, the higher seeded 1509E team made it to semi finals and qualified for the big tournament in early spring. Congratulations to all the teams and their efforts. There were some amazing teams.
Our rookie team (Adia Sisson, Alex Luo and Ira Madill), who did not compete at this event, now understand the complexities of competitive robotics and have new insights for the machine they are developing.
It was great to have Ava O’Toole back to help at our tournament. She kept us organized, which is not always easy. Special thanks to my co-mentor, Mr. Scott McCambley.
Our next tournament is in St. Catharines at Governor Simcoe on December 12th.
– Mr. Rodney Reimer, Head of Robotics and Engineering, VEX Robotics Mentor