Eliza Lazaro

Team Tricerabots collaborates in fixing their robot. They competed at Troy Buchanan High School Oct. 18. “We made a lot of new friends,” Antara Sriram (10) said. “Which is a great part of the competition.”

Vex Robotics had their inaugural competition Oct. 18 at Troy Buchanan High School, featuring two Ladue teams. Team Gheese, driven by Dheeran Ramesh (10), dominated the event, securing first place and the Excellence award. While Team Tricerabots, driven by Elliot Levine (10), made it to quarterfinals but not without issues.

“Our robot broke a lot,” Antara Sriram (10) said. “But, it was a really early competition, so we didn’t have a lot of time for iterations and stuff. Our robot wasn’t exactly the best. It was falling apart, every match. [But] we were able to use what we had that did work to our advantage, which was really helpful.” 

Despite one team having some early struggles with their robot, Team Gheese started out the year nearly perfect. 

“Gheese did really well,” Sriram said.“ I think they put a lot of work in so far, and it’s really showing on the competition field. They should be proud of themselves.” 

Still, the Tricerabots took away positives from the competition; the opportunity to connect with other people and make new friends.

“We got to collaborate with other teams and form alliances,” Sriram said. “That’s a really fun part about robotics—meeting new people and collaborating with different teams from different parts of the state.”

The teams will compete again in Nov. and the Tricerabots will continue to build their bot to give it an advantage towards the challenge.

“The biggest challenge is match loading, where you have to take the blocks out of these tubes,” Amelia Chostner (11) said. “The hardest part is there’s a ledge at the bottom of the tube, so it’s really hard to take the blocks out without designing a whole new mechanism for it. And that’s something that’s really hard, for our team and for a lot of other teams.”

Along with the match loading, the Tricerabots plan to continue to add other upgrades to their robot, but before the next competition they have a long way to go.  

“I would say for our team, we have to do a lot of iterations,” Sriram said. “So maybe figuring out what didn’t go well for this competition and figuring out what we need to fix for [the] next competition would be our biggest step, and then trying to prioritize coding and design process along with building.”