Frazer School robotics teams qualify for World Championship
Press release from the Frazer School
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The Frazer School is one of only two schools in Florida with two teams qualifying for the VEX World Championship.
All four of the Frazer School’s V5 robotics teams joined 32 other teams to compete at the VEX North/Central Florida High School Regional Championship this past Sunday. This year’s V5 challenge is “Push Back,” a game where the object is to score as many 18-sided blocks as they can into four tube-shaped goals. Each team gets a chance to showcase its skill through a series of tasks: a driver skills challenge, an autonomous programming challenge, a 2v2 tournament, and an extensive judging process that includes a detailed engineering notebook and team interview by a team of judges. Of the 120 high school teams in North/Central Florida, only 36 teams qualify for the regional championship, and only 12 teams from the regional championship qualify for the VEX World Championship. The Frazer School and Orlando’s Timber Creek High School are the only two schools in Florida to send multiple teams to Worlds this year.
Team 13722A – Green House (George Li, Avery Moran, Bhuvan Naru, and Garrick Wu) – won the Excellence Award at the competition, the highest award possible at any event. The team’s combined engineering notebook, team interview score, skills ranking, and qualification ranking were all considered when being chosen for this award.
The skills ranking of Team 13722V – Invictus (Robert Ceobanu, Nick Chronley, and Miles Snead) – allowed them to claim a Worlds spot as well. The other Frazer School award winners at the competition were team 13722Z – Zeno (Lucas Chen, Sylvia Guo, Ivan Kory, and Isaac Trillo) – who won the Sportsmanship Award and team 13722G – Magnus Turbius (Connor Guthrie, Keerthi Karri, Jay Kim, and Sean Kim) – who won the Judges Award.
“We learned a lot from our first year in V5, and that experience helped our teams keep up with the top teams in Florida this time around,” says Frazer robotics coach Steve Yu. “The hundreds of hours that each of these students has dedicated to their craft has paid off. I couldn’t be more proud of them!”
Frazer School Principal O. Fayiga said, “I am so proud of these kids and their coach, Mr. Yu. They were the only team in Florida to have three separate teams win awards: the Sportsmanship award, the Judges award, and the Excellence award. These kids come into the school almost every weekend and practice for hours. Their commitment to success is amazing to watch.”
The VEX V5 World Championship takes place mid-April in St. Louis, Missouri this year. The top 800+ teams from 80+ countries will compete to claim the title of World Champion.