Published March 22, 2022

Two WCS high school teams will hit the world stage as they compete in the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas at the beginning of May.

Brentwood High's team, Exotek, is made up of eight sophomores: Anthony Beckett, Yuhua Cai, Grant Carpenter, Lucas Clevenger, Luke Haws, Shaunak Moghe, Quin Wehby and Vikram Vinayagam. Some of the members have been involved in robotics and working together since sixth grade.

"The team's engineering notebook, which captures the brainstorming of ideas and the step-by-step building process, is about the best to date in competitive robotics," said BHS robotics coach Dr. Roberto Marrero. "Their current plan is to incorporate sensor technology to improve the robot's performance. As amateur engineers, they will take every test and performance data to improve on their design and do better."

Ravenwood High students Mark Bell, Adwit Satyawadi and Connor Tasik earned spots at both the JROTC VEX National Championship and the VEX Robotics World Championship. The team has been together for three years.

"At first, we didn't believe it," said RHS team captain Connor Tasik. "The match was super close, and it took a while to score everything. The whole gym seemed to cheer with the team. We worked hundreds of hours after school and on weekends to rebuild, tweak and program. For Worlds, we're going to make a few tweaks to the design and coding, but our big plan is to paint the robot dark brown and make it look like a Cosmic Brownie with the colored screws."

At the World Championship, teams will play Tipping Point. Two teams will compete in each match, which includes a 15-second autonomous period followed by a one-minute, 45-second driver-controlled period. The object of the game is to earn more points by scoring rings, moving mobile goals and elevating on platforms at the end of the match.

The Ravenwood High robotics team is raising funds to help with their trip to the World Championship in Dallas. For more information, visit the fundraiser's page.

In addition to the teams who qualified for the championship, another Brentwood High team, consisting of BHS seniors Angie Dai, Jack Hudson, Konstantinos Kostoulas and Himesh Patel, is on the waiting list to attend.