(December 20, 2011) -- Her hands gripped the once foreign controls as her brow furrowed in concentration. With blithe dexterity, she drops the red racket ball into the centerpiece and then quickly drives the robot into the red square.

The two-minute timer beeps and the squealing tires cease amid a mix of cheers and sighs, signaling the end of the round. Picking up the VEX robot, junior Margarita Petrosian takes it to a nearby table to make a few improvements.

“At first, I was the rammer, but during the five-minute break I added something to my robot because I saw what could be better,” Petrosian said. “Because once you really do it, you get what you could have done different. So I added a little piece and the second time I was scorer.”

Like the rest of the Robotics Engineering students in teacher David Black’s fourth period class, Petrosian competed in the VEX Robotics competition on Dec. 14 to enhance her skills in building the robot and also try her hand at some Computer Assisted Design (CAD).

Black said that the students did really well. Their robots scored many racket balls through good offensive and defensive scoring, getting higher points than the students who competed in the last competition.

“The idea behind the VEX robots is to get a hands on experience to physically assemble the parts. After they have the physical robot built, tested, refined and improved, we compete and then they go back and complete a 3D computer model after they’ve built it,” Black said.

After introducing the parts of the VEX robot and explaining what the function of each part is and how the motors and gears work, the class spent a month constructing their robot. Each team then spent an additional week constructing a 3D CAD model of their VEX Robot.

Petrosian said that she and her teammate looked at an example from the instruction manual and did something like it but it didn’t work so they had to pull apart their robot two or three times.

“The wheels wouldn’t move or the gears were stuck or the motors were dead a few times and we had to change it. Different things like that happened so we had to pull it apart again and just try different stuff. We had to see what was most comfortable that we actually understood how to drive it so we can actually benefit other team during the competition,” Petrosian said.




Junior Vahan Keshishyan didn’t experience as many problems as Petrosian. He said that because he was also in Engineering Club after school, he is used to handling problems that arise.

“We used a normal design, a cube robot with four wheels and medium sized gears on both sides that with four engines running all the wheels,” Keshishyan said.

Black said that the competition’s goal was to construct a teleoperated robot — operated by remote control — to pick up a racket ball and place it in a goal. “Last year out of two class periods, only one got to do VEX. This year, we structured time a little differently so each class got to do the VEX competition,” he said.

Petrosian said that she thought the assignment was challenging but still enjoyed it. “It was kind of interesting because I thought I wouldn’t be able to do any of this, and once you’re done then you’re like, ‘Oh hey, this is kind of fun,’” Petrosian said.