Girl Powered
blamb
Entry ID #: 3483
Created: Tue, Jan 10, 2017 9:47 PM
Hi. We are team 37X Vex Force. Our team consists of Neema Baddam, Sadie Sawyer, Peyton Schumacher, and Sylee Acharya. We all go to Cranbrook Kingswood Girls Middle School. I can definitely say that we’ve changed since the start of this year’s Vex IQ Robotics season. Our team has become better at understanding how to combine our different skills and areas of strength to be the best we can be. Granted, sometimes it’s not the best in the competition, but that’s a given. Sometimes you can’t win, so you just have to try your very best, and hope that’s enough. For us, it is. I think at the beginning of the season, we were all new here, and didn’t know each other, so it was harder to get acclimated to the environment of middle school Vex IQ, which is definitely different from what we’ve experienced in the past. Not to mention we had just met. But we soon found out that robotics wasn’t easy. It takes work and practice, but in the end it makes something great that you can have fun with. Sadie and Peyton were a little more experienced than Sylee and I, so at the beginning, I will admit, we were a bit behind. But since then we have become much better, whether it’s driving, programming, or building the robot. You have to realize that robotics is a program where you can work together and work individually, improving skills in both areas. And in both areas, our team has overcome difficult challenges, like having to rebuild robots or programs not working. But eventually, we all found our special strengths and we know how to use them now, becoming closer as a team and as friends. Vex IQ is definitely a challenge. But there is something special about the challenge and the feeling of achievement you get when you see your robot driving around, or your program working. It gives us a goal, and motivation to strive to achieve it. I think that Vex IQ changed our team in more than one way, from working together on matches to skills, like programming or driving. More than once we had to start over, and just get really frustrated in general. Since the beginning of the season we have realized that Vex IQ is more than just building robots. It helps to develop special skills, like creative thinking and problem solving. You have to be able to react to any situation on the field and that is probably the best thing about it. We have run into many different scenarios on the field, and whether they are good or bad, it’s the experience that makes us better than when we started.