After this article’s publication March 18, an additional Mount Vernon team, 43050E, qualified for World’s due to its world ranking. The article was updated March 31 to reflect this change.
MOUNT VERNON — Mount Vernon robotics students will compete against students from across the world in May.
Three of Mount Vernon’s four middle school teams will compete at the VEX Robotics World Championship, but all Mount Vernon robotics students have the opportunity to attend Worlds, which will occur May 3-5 in Dallas, Texas.
Two of its four middle school teams qualified for Worlds through their performance in a statewide competition the weekend of March 11. The third team qualified for Worlds later in March, through its world ranking.
The district had competed at the state level prior to this year, but 2022 marks the first year the three-year-old program has advanced to Worlds.
The tasks the students will have to compete at Worlds will be similar to those during their past competitions. The level of competition and size of the event will be key differences, robotics coach Emily Miller explained.
But the competition itself is only one aspect of the value of Worlds, Miller said.
“It is quite legitimately Worlds, meaning that you might be playing with teams from China or from Indonesia or from all over the world, and there’s often language barriers,” Miller said, explaining students will have to find alternative ways to communicate at times through diagrams and online translators.
So far, teams are registered from countries such as Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Canada, as well as various other parts of the United States.
Students will also meet their competitors and learn about their respective cultures off the competition field, as each team will have a pit table where they showcase items and food from their home countries, Miller said.
“We’re going there to play, but the ultimate goal that I have is just the learning experience the whole team can have from it,” Miller said.
A look at past performance and future goals
Mount Vernon robotics is broken up into smaller teams for competitions, with four teams at the middle school level and two at the high school level, which are all named after Mount Vernon’s zip code.
The teams that qualified for Worlds during the state competition include team #43050B with eighth graders Mason Chesnut (captain, head builder and driver), Isabella Sherman (coder) and Natasha Jose (engineering notebook recorder and scout); as well as team #43050C with eighth graders Aspen McMahon (captain and head builder), Lily Grace (engineering notebook recorder), as well as seventh graders Shaun Barlow (builder), Carsten Hahn (driver) and Scout Nathan Hofferberth (coder).
Ohio sends eight teams to Worlds, and there are several ways for teams to qualify. Mount Vernon’s teams qualified through States because they made it to the semifinal round.
When a team wins a tournament, it does so along with another team that it forms an alliance with. In States, the Mount Vernon’s B and C teams aligned in the semifinal round. While they ultimately lost, they still qualified for Worlds because they had made it to semifinals.
Teams can also qualify for Worlds through skills rankings.
After States,#43050E qualified for Worlds due to its world ranking. This team includes eighth graders Grant Mesarchik (captain, head builder), Sala Glandon (head engineering notebook recorder, scout and assistant to coach), Ben Henricksen (head coder), as well as seventh graders Myla Miller (coder), Megan Packard (builder) and Hailey Waibel (builder and engineering notebook recorder).
Team captain for team B, Mason Chesnut, joined robotics last year as a seventh grader, when he also competed in States. Chesnut said he, personally, and the teams at large are working on improving various skills before Worlds, one example being rings.
The object of competitions is to attain a higher score than the opposing alliance, which is done by scoring rings as well as moving mobile goals to alliance zones and elevating on platforms.
Mount Vernon’s alliance lost the semi-finals because a ring got stuck under its robot and made them unable to drive, Chesnut said.
“In middle school robotics in these tournaments just around Ohio and in Mount Vernon, we don’t really incorporate the rings very much, but the high school teams very much do,” Chesnut said. “I’m thinking at Worlds, with all these better bots, rings are definitely going to get incorporated and we need to be able to score those rings on the post, which is something we’re definitely going to work on.”
Chesnut’s goal for Worlds is twofold: make it to the end elimination bracket and have fun.
“Worlds is just going to be a really fun experience,” Chesnut said, “and I think it’s going to be really fun for the whole team just to be there.”
Eighth grader Aspen McMahon is captain for the other team advancing to worlds, #43050C. McMahon, who is also head builder, said she and her team learned lessons during States they will be improving upon for Worlds.
“I learned that we need to make our clamp stronger, which is what I’m doing right now,” McMahon said during an interview as she worked on a robot after school.
Matches include both an autonomous period and a driver-controlled period. McMahon’s team is also working on coding more autonomous robots to improve the former.
“Right now we only have one or two consistent autons and we’re trying to get multiple so that it can fit whatever alliance we have for Worlds,” McMahon said.
While McMahon had some previous competition experience going into States, for seventh grader Carsten Hahn on her team, it had been all new.
“I was surprised by how many people were actually there,” Hahn said of States. “And I was surprised at the amount of support you can get from the Mount Vernon community.”
Hahn’s entire family and several other families of robotics students attended States to cheer the teams on. Hahn served as a driver but also helped scout during States, meaning Hahn worked to form alliances with other teams, ready with a line of questions to ensure a good match.
Quick adaptation is a skill Hahn has honed.
When a clamp broke or the ring mechanism was not working, Hahn had to figure out how to drive without them. As Hahn prepares for Worlds, a main goal will be to ensure familiarity with some new mechanics being added to the robots.
Mount Vernon’s B, C and E teams were also invited to Nationals based on their award wins throughout the season, Miller said. The district decided to forgo Nationals due to the travel and costs associated as well as the timeline for registration. The team would have had to register for nationals before they found out about its Worlds eligibility.
“Most of the time, teams will choose one or the other,” Miller said of Nationals and Worlds.
The district’s other four teams that did not advance to Worlds missed qualifying by small margins, Miller said, adding that there had still been a possibility for the others to advance as skills scores were being tallied this past week.
Overall, the program views any team’s win as a win for all, which was exemplified during the state competition, Miller said.
“The E team had just gotten knocked out and they came back to the stands and sat there and they were cheering and screaming for the B and C team,” she explained.
“And, they help each other all the time. You know, if there’s a problem, our builders all go and try to figure out what the issue is, or another coder will hop over with the coder that’s having a problem and fix it. So we’re all one team, we just function with multiple bots.”
If businesses or individuals are interested in sponsoring Mount Vernon for Worlds, they can email emiller@mvcsd.us for details and to be included in the sponsor banner.
