West Salem teams heading to robotics world competition
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It’s taken months of building, debugging, testing — and several printer fires — but West Salem High School’s Team Xenon is ready for its big day.
The team of students is one of two heading to Dallas, Texas in May to compete in the VEX Robotics World Championship against nearly 500 teams hailing from as far away as Morocco and Singapore.
Team Voltage, a group of sophomores, will also compete on the world stage.
Vaughn Fidler, a junior, explained Xenon’s qualification came after an intense day-long state competition in March.
“I knew that we had a chance,” Fidler recalled after seeing the team’s initial scores.
Xenon ultimately earned an Excellence Award, qualifying them for the world competition.
“It was a really good experience going up there. I felt all of my hard work pay off,” he said.
Robotics teams each year build and program robots that can play a particular game, which is set by the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, the governing body. This year’s game, High Stakes, has robots compete to place colored rings on stakes across a 12 foot square playing field. Some stakes are mounted, requiring robots to climb or reach.
Teams compete in alliances, with two robots for each side on the field at the same time. Rings are red and blue, and each alliance only scores one color. That means robots have to be able to “see” which color they’re picking up.
Robots play a portion of the game autonomously, and a portion with a human driver.
Teams can score in multiple ways during the game by placing rings or climbing features. Qualifying for worlds can happen by winning the tournament, as well as winning awards for particular robot features or skills.
Students on the robotics team have a class at West, but also work after school, sometimes into the evening, to perfect their designs.
“I usually have to kick them out,” teacher Zachary Link said of his teams.
Getting their robot to pick up and hold onto the correct color rings was a challenge, Fidler said. Initially, they struggled with the robot ejecting rings. He demonstrated its functionality, driving it around a practice field in the classroom’s lab. The robot can scan rings for color, tossing incorrect ones aside and holding on to the ones it keeps to place on stakes.
The world competition begins May 6. Both West Salem teams are raising money to cover travel and lodging costs.
West Salem is known for its strong robotics program, with former teacher Greg Smith earning a national teaching award in 2019.
Smith retired last year, leaving Link, an engineering and computer science teacher, in charge of the program.
The two had worked together for years, but Link said he was nervous about breaking the school’s 15 year streak of sending students to world robotics competitions during his first year flying solo.
“My goal is to keep that going,” he said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE.
Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade and is a past president of Oregon's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
