Brentwood’s Bot Battles

22 February 2022Sebastian M, Privett ‘22

On February 6th, four teams from Brentwood departed to Highlands Secondary School in Comox for the Regional Qualifiers Robotics Competition. The international competition is designed by VEX robotics and has completely different rules every year. This year the competitions have returned to in-person tournaments, allowing the games to involve a two against two format with full contact between the bots.

The scoring of the game is quite complex, so many teams approached this competition with very different designs and strategies. Several of the ways to score points include moving the goals to your side of the arena, stacking plastic rings on the goals at different heights, balancing the goals on top of a teeter-totter, and balancing your own robot on it instead – a surreal montage of a game.

On March 5th, the Vancouver Island Regional tournament will be held at Shawnigan Lake School, where the winners can qualify directly into the World Championships. Mr Doehler, the head of the robotics program for the past seven years, says “The Vancouver Island area is internationally a real hot-spot for high-school robotics and it looks promising that we will likely have five Brentwood teams at the upcoming championships”.

The robotics students have been preparing for this competition since the beginning of the year, and although Brentwood’s art program is not able to provide as many hours in a week as some of the other schools’ clubs do, many of our students have put in time outside of the allotted schedule in order to get ready.

The two robotics Co-Captains, Sky S, Rogers ‘22 and Jade K, Mackenzie ‘22, have been testing and tuning their robot since September and have also been involved with the robotics program for three and four years respectively. As Sky explains, “We’ve had to change up our robot quite a bit, but our plan from the start has been to go for the goals and not the rings”. Jade adds that “We have gotten pushed around a lot so far by some of the quicker bots, but all in all the competition is really fun and I encourage students to give robotics a try here at Brentwood”.

Noah S, Privett ‘23 confesses “We have put a lot of time in outside of the schedule troubleshooting and tuning the robot. The trial and error can get frustrating, but I like the hands-on problem solving and I might want to do something with robotics in the future. The two competitions so far have been lots of fun – but we still need to sort out the autonomous half of our robot.”

Let’s all wish Brentwood good luck at the upcoming tournament. Keep up the good work!

Sebastian M, Privett ‘22

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