By Caleb Youngblood, Public Relations Coordinator
March 10, 2023
VEX Robotics, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is a major program for students from elementary through university. Robotics tournaments are held year-round at the regional, state, and national levels. All these tournaments lead to the VEX Robotics World Championship that takes place each April. In April of 2018, VEX Robotics Competition was named the largest robotics competition in the world by Guinness World Records.
On March 8, 2023, MSMS Team A and Team B competed in the Mississippi VEX Robotics State Championship. The State Championship was held at Mississippi College in Clinton, MS. A total of twenty-two teams battled it out to place in the top four so that they could advance to the World Championship stage.
MSMS A Team Members – Eddie Lai, Andrew Liu, Vivek Nagarajan, Geethika Polepalli, Mandy Sun, Veer Vanmali, Sahib Gill, Max Feng, Ashton Taylor, Ashton Lollis
MSMS B Team Members – CJ Mason, CJ Jordan, Sephora Poteau, Harsika Dillibabu, Laya Karavadi, Alex White, Iysiahs York, Gavin Weinstein, Julia Ngyuen, Kermit Orville
Skills Challenge:
These rounds consist of driving skills matches, which will be entirely driver controlled, and programming skills matches, which will be autonomous with limited human interaction.
- A Team ranked fifth with a score of 208 points
- B Team ranked thirteenth with a score of 108 points
Qualification Round:
These matches put random teams in an alliance together to play matches out to rank them. Once the rank is finalized, the alliance selection starts at the top of the rank, so the first seed gets to choose an alliance partner, followed by the next seed until all brackets are filled.
- A team won all six matches and ranked second overall with a score of 478 points
- B Team won five of their six matches and ranked fourth overall with a score of 411 points
Final Round:
- A Team joined with New Hope Robotics and won their final matchup
- B Team lost a hard-fought quarterfinal match
A Team secured the state championship and will be attending the VEX Robotics World Championship 2023 in Dallas, TX.
To learn more about the upcoming competition, please click here.