For the first time in the team’s history, the Women in Engineering (WE) VEX-U robotics team at Texas A&M University won the Excellence Award, qualifying for the 2020 VEX World Championship, at the Regional VEX Robotics Competition on Feb. 22.
The Excellence Award is the highest award presented at the regional competition. This award is presented to a team that exemplifies overall excellence, which is determined by the team’s design, teamwork, robot skills, and overall program. Although the team advanced to the World Championship, the event has been canceled in response to COVID-19.
“Receiving the Excellence Award is a huge honor for any team and we worked extremely hard for it,” said Maddie Foster, project manager. “It meant a lot to see all our hard work pay off, and knowing we are representing Women in Engineering made it even more worthwhile.”
Shawna Fletcher, WE director, said that it’s important that students are in charge and work to make the team a success.
“There are many first- and second-year students, with little to no previous experience, who get involved and hone their skills by learning from other students,” said Fletcher.
Melissa Zhang, programming team lead and computer science junior, said that the team plans to continue giving students a hands-on experience to improve their technical skills and aim for the world championship again next year.
“We planned to redesign the robot for Worlds in order to make up for all the shortcomings we observed during regionals,” Zhang said. “Next year, we hope to create a better autonomous routine for the competition and for skills.”
In the months leading up to the regional competition, Foster said that the team spent half of their meeting time collaborating and sharing ideas between the programming and mechanical sub-teams.
“Spending time sharing ideas and giving each other feedback and support allows us to grow together and be better as a whole,” Foster said.
Their team is broken into two main components: a mechanical and programming team. This allows the teams to effectively build a robot that meets the team’s designed robot requirements and allow the robot to perform desired actions.
“Being in such a collaborative environment, every team member knows that they can ask anyone for help without hesitation,” Foster said. “Our leaders this year really connected with the new members and it was great seeing them grow with the team."
This year’s game was named VEX-U Robotics Competition Tower Takeover. Robots were designed to stack cubes on the field into towers or score them into a team’s respective goal zones. The objective of the game is to attain a higher score than the opposing team. This competition encouraged the team to learn new things.
“At first, I was overwhelmed by the number of members I needed to teach and spent a lot of the time walking around and solving any technical problems that occurred,” Zhang said. “This made me realize the importance of planning ahead, especially when it comes to a large team.”
Zhang said that VEX-U Robotics changes the game annually to push students to create new solutions, robots and strategies to conquer the new challenges given.
“For our team, this translates into giving women hands-on experience to improve their technical skills in problem-solving, programming and translating ideas to reality by building the robot,” Zhang said.
“The team has done a terrific job, improving from year to year,” said Fletcher. “Winning the Excellence Award was the icing on the cake, and the college is proud of all they have accomplished. Even though Worlds was canceled, the team is moving forward and already planning for next year. These students are dedicated and deserve recognition.”
Contact weoutreach@tamu.edu for more information on WE or the VEX-U team.