Recently the Berlin High School VEX Robotics Club has been building their machine and competing. Their most recent competition was Saturday, Dec. 14 at Neenah’s Merry VEXmas, where they placed first among the other eight teams.
“Our next competition will be at St. Mary Catholic on January 11, 2025, ” adviser Gus Hetcher said.
This is Hetcher’s first year being an adviser of Robotics. Part of his role in Robotics is providing practice time for the team, ordering parts, registering for events, and coordinating with the team. Organizing practice time has been a challenge for the team this year, with members being at work or doing other after-school activities. The process of making their machine has been a lengthy one, but they were able to complete it in four weeks.
“The building process takes on a few steps from the design and modeling aspect where you start with an idea of what the robot will look like and what its functions will be. Once you have a design you start the build process and throughout the build, many modifications are made to the design to perfect its performance,” Hetcher said. “Once a bot is completed, the brain needs to be coded so it knows what to do when it’s run. After it runs, steps include optimizing its performance and fixing any imperfections.”
Fixing these imperfections in the machine is something that is still continuing. Senior Tom Schumacher takes the lead on fixing both in competitions and out.
“The hard part is going to be scoring on the wall stakes, and figuring that out. It could be a challenge,” Schumacher said.
Each year the competitions are designed around a different game. Last year’s challenge was to build a machine that could get balls, called try-balls, into a goal. This year the game is to build a machine that can put rings on stakes.
“There are stakes on the walls that you score on, and there’s also stakes that are mobile goals and can move those stakes around and put those in corners, and then there’s also a ladder in the center that you can climb. There are wheels that sucked it up and push it down onto the goal,” Schumacher said.
With the game or challenges being so different each year, the club has to start over and make a new machine each fall to get it to work the way that they want it to.
During the competition junior James Paskey said that the competitions are hectic, and that they have to get there a few hours early to make sure everything is ready. You have like eight or so matches the span of eight hours. I drive the bot during the matches, and then I also am a coder this year. I have to kind of figure out how the code of the bot thought the thing.
To be able to qualify for state the Robotics team needed to score well enough in their first competition, which they did, allowing them to go to State on March 15-16, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Until then they have other competitions that they can compete in both to try and win, and to know what they need to modify on the machine before they get to state, and possibly on to worlds. In order to properly build and edit their machine, teamwork and collaboration are required within the team.
“I really enjoy how independent it is for the students, they do all the work, and being able to see what they can put together is truly impressive,” Hetcher said.
