This year, four Sutton Grammar students—myself (Bianca I - 12D), Harry W (11M), James M (11M), and Josiah P (11G) — have been competing in the VEX Robotics Competition. Last term, we participated in four regional events across the UK, with both of our teams achieving notable success.

Entropy, the team Harry and I compete in, is in its second year. Last season, we won the top award at Nationals, and then represented the UK at the World Championships. This year, we have continued our strong performance, winning five awards so far: two Tournament Champion titles, for the best performance in the robot matches, as well as two Excellence Awards and one Innovate Award, for the engineering, design and programming of our robot, and our documentation thereof. The Excellence Award is the highest judged award, as it is based on multiple criteria, and requires strong all-round performance. These wins have now qualified us for the National Championships in March.

Fun fact: according to an obscure metric called Trueskill, which ranks robotics teams based on their match data, we're apparently the third-best team in the world by 'raw skill.' Whether that's true is... up for debate, but it’s fun to consider!

Meanwhile, a few words from team Cyclone, the team of James M and Josiah:

For our first few months of robotics, we have been improving with every competition we attend and every week we work and we have been enjoying it thoroughly so far. Even though we haven't got a spot to nationals so far, we have been learning and improving at a rapid rate and we are excited for our journey to come. We’ve consistently gotten to semi and quarter finals at each competition with respectable rankings as we iterate and refine our engineering skills.

Overall, these competitions have taught us valuable lessons about problem-solving, engineering, and teamwork. We're all looking forward to pushing ourselves further in the following months.

Bianca Ivanova