Nine teams from the OPEF VEX Robotics programs at Brooks and Julian got up in the wee hours of the morning last Saturday to attend the Illinois VEX Robotics State Championship in Batavia, Illinois. They competed against the best middle school and high school VEX Robotics teams in Illinois in this day-long tournament. They came home with five awards, including both middle school awards!
Robots at this weekend’s tournament battled in a 12′ x 12′ arena to score the most points in this year’s VEX Challenge game, Skyrise. Savvy engineering design was key in this year’s challenge. The teams competed until mid-afternoon in a series of grueling matches. They were also interviewed and observed by judges for awards such as best robot design, best autonomous design, best sportsmanship and so on. The best teams then got to select two teams to form an alliance and move into the final Elimination Matches.
Six of our teams made it into the Elimination Matches: Blue Man Group, Hydra Resurrection, Muppets, Gearheads, United Alpaca Force and iBots. All except the Muppets were finally eliminated in the Quarterfinals. Muppets battled on through some tough matches before their alliance was finally victorious and won the tournament.
Congratulations to all the OPEF VEX Robotics teams for an amazing season!
And special thanks to all our VEX coaches–Tim Walsh, Brian Shinners, Marc Bishop, Erin Howe, Jessica Moncatch, Jason Morrell and Maureen O’Rourke.
The State Championship winning teams are:
Middle School Excellence Award, 7480D Dream Team (Julian): Katie Dickel, Eva Berger-Wolf, Kenya Reeves, Sophie Schoenmeyer, Simon Wakely, Luca Zefran
Tournament Champions, 7183D Muppets (Brooks): Aiden Domenz, Nicholas Evans, Jake Matyas, Ben Moyer, Cyrus Murray
Middle School Design Award, 7183C Hydra Resurrection (Brooks): Takuma Kawamura, Jamal Sachleben, Rachel Taylor
Programming Skills Award, 7480A Gold Rush (Julian): Christian Barrett, James Kennedy, Christopher Lee, Audrey Maza, Emet Sensat, Henry Wolff
Sportsmanship Award, 7480N Blue Man Group (Julian): Ethan Gale, Ruben Hernandez, Janae Hill, Andrew Kitzman, Zane Maggio
Check out this slideshow of photos from the Illinois State Championship.