ONALASKA, Wis. (WXOW) – St. Paul’s Lutheran School in Onalaska is sending it’s two teams to Texas in May to test their robotics skills in the World Championships.
Four 4-member teams competed at the state tournament in Appleton, and two of them scored enough skills points to qualify for the Middle School VEX-IQ World Championships.
Joining 12 other teams to represent Wisconsin, a mix of eight 7th and 8th grade students and two coaches will test robots 33033v and 33033F against nearly 800 international teams spanning six continents.
Robotics team coach and school principal Benjamin Bain said the students are really looking forward to the 3-day competition in Dallas.
“The students were just overjoyed to get that opportunity, Principal Bain said. “They were so excited for the opportunity. And we looked at some of the costs and tried to decide could we afford to do this? And decided that we were able to get some fundraising to help allow them to be able to make that trip.”
Fellow coach Joe Fetcenko has been working alongside Bain guiding the students all year with problem solving challenges, robot build and design, and computer coding.
The competition involves two skills, autonomous and driver controlled techniques, where each round allows one minute to place as many balls into a scoring bin as they can.
St. Paul’s Lutheran 8th grader, Jonah Degner, said the whole year was spent working through a series of trial and error trying to build more than just a robot ball pusher.
“We came back from Christmas, we got an idea,” Degner explained. “Let’s actually do something. And so we took on the challenge of making the catapult launcher so then instead of getting our high score of 30 we had a high score of 80.”
The teams head down to the Lone Star State for the May 8-10 3-day tournament.
Over the next few weeks, students will be tweaking and preparing their robots to be as competitive as possible.
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