By Toby (9M), Alexander (9G), Shourya (9M)  & Madhur (9M) - SGS Eclipse - 34533E

In recent months, our school has been participating in the VEX IQ Robotics Competition. A group of students were chosen to join the team and compete, and through fun, misery, disappointment, and lots and lots of pain, here’s our entire journey.

We started in October, when we began the job of constructing our robot. For this article, this process was relatively smooth (it was not).

By January, we had a functioning robot that worked and we began to test and program. You see, we had to do everything ourselves, from building to coding; it was all us.

We wrote some code to control the robot, and again, it worked (on the 38,764,275,672nd  iteration) pretty well. Now came our first major problem: the robot had to function fully autonomously (by itself). This would have been simple, were we not accounting for drift and wheel slip and bad field conditions and a million other factors that could affect our program.

Still, we managed to pull through and write an autonomous program that worked.

So, full of excitement and energy and the rather naïve thought that we were the best and would beat everyone else in the whole country, we went to our first competition…

It was a disaster. So much of a disaster that we were lucky not to come dead last. And the autonomous program, that we were so sure worked, failed. Spectacularly. It was meant to score 52 points, it scored 0. We had to win at least one competition to get into the National Finals, and this was looking more unlikely than ever.

But we had a second chance. The next day, we were taking a train up to London for another competition. So, we spent 6 hours when we came back preparing after getting back to (we did not sleep that night).

We arrived at our London competition, nervous. We couldn’t fail again. We tried our absolute hardest in our driver-controlled matches and came 4th  overall, getting us a finals match. The team before us had scored 56 points, which we knew we could beat.

We went all in on this match and scored an impressive 45 points with just seconds left on the clock. Just one more goal would give us 57 points, and a ticket to nationals. We were allied with another robot for this match, they were aligned perfectly with a goal, ready to score and get us into nationals. But…

Their robot broke at the last second and we lost.

What about autonomous? Yeah… that didn’t work either. In fact, we were nearly going to win an award that would have also gotten us to nationals, all we needed to do was score one autonomous point. One single point. Our robot drifted. A lot. It didn’t align with the goals at all and it failed.

This would’ve been the end of our journey. We’d come so far since our first competition, we were so tantalisingly close to getting into the finals. We won the design award but that didn’t qualify us for the national finals. We couldn’t stop there.

So, we booked in one final competition…and then got invited to nationals anyway (we got in through our robot skills). We did well enough in London that we received an invite despite the autonomous program not working. Which was just as well as our final competition almost involved us getting beaten by primary school children. Fortunately, we avoided that humiliation but Mr Turner's made a big mistake: he did things properly. Being the only adult who actually followed the instructions and submitted his correct information, he was awarded a teacher’s pass instead of a parent one. Unfortunately, since all students and adults who were visitors needed to be accompanied by a teacher, Mr Turner spent the day traipsing backwards and forwards to the toilets. We thought it was funnier than he did. (It was not funny – Mr Turner)

Although we didn’t win anything at the final competition, we were through to the national finals. With true Sutton Grammar confidence, we truly believed that we could triumph at the national finals and maybe qualify for World Finals. But the odds were stacked against us. There were 60 teams at nationals and only 7 went on. We would have to put everything into this robot to win.

So, with two weeks left until nationals, we put our all in and tried as hard as we could to win.

During the half term, whilst everybody else was on holiday having fun, our team met up at someone’s house every day to either build, drive or code the robot. Along with this, we had to document the process every single day. As a matter of fact, in the half term, our robot’s documentation reached a phenomenal milestone of 270 pages. This was a huge step from the previous notebook that we had taken to regionals. Our notebook was full of detailed explanations, sketches and other interesting contents. Our notebook was now very competitive and our team knew that it was a glorious chance to try and earn our spot at International’s, which is held in Dallas, Texas, a Southern state in the USA.

As the half term flew by, the date was Saturday 1st of March 2025, where the whole team would meet up at Sutton Grammar School to travel on a minibus to the accommodation for the next two nights: a luxury mansion with about a dozen bedrooms. Yep, it was like living in paradise: the beds were so comfortable, the kitchen was massive and the living room was very comfortable. Well, our team would be relaxing on the sofa playing on our phones if the competition wasn’t the next day. Well, it was - and we knew we had to do well. That meant another sleepless night.

As we were about to test autonomous, which surprisingly worked later on, the main coder’s laptop charger broke. Literally. The end was bent and had no way to fit inside the laptop. Our team thought that it was over. That was until the main notebooker’s laptop came to save the day because that charger worked. This was fine except for the fact that…it was in Chinese.

Well, of course no one in our team could read Chinese except the lead notebooker. So the lead notebooker was called in to read it and translate it. For those who think this is not specific enough, it was in Traditional Mandarin. Anyways, after the hustle, the autonomous code worked! Our team started cheering. Then we tested it again. It still worked. Our team was elated with joy as we practiced some more driving and then went to bed.

After sleeping past midnight, the alarm blared at 5:30 am. You may question the ringtone. Was it a lullaby to wake us up? No. It sounded like a nuclear explosion was about to happen and that it was warning everybody to run. Instantly. In our case, we all woke up in a cold sweat, only to realise it was a prank from one of our teammates (no names here by the way). We woke up and ate breakfast… and argued a little due to some disagreements that were resolved rapidly (this is an understatement)
(‘Argued a little’ is a huge understatement – Mr Turner).

When we arrived at the venue at around 7 am, we were shocked. Everything was massive and we were astounded at the sheer enormity of the arena. At 9 am it was the opening ceremony and we were incredibly excited. The team grabbed seats close to the screen and prepared to watch the ceremony. It was an enormously amazing experience that fired us all up for what was to come. After the ceremony (which introduced the venue and how the matches would work), we got straight to the practice fields to max out our high score. We ended up spending most of our time testing “pure pursuit” - a complex algorithm which made the robot move in a circular pattern, too complex to explain here. Our first match went abysmally, and we had realised that someone had sabotaged our robot - our catapult was half-destroyed. We didn't have enough time to fix it before our next match - where we got our lowest score ever.

After we fixed our robot for our next match, we got a good score - HAPPY! But after arriving back to our pit, our next challenge arrived - our first interview. Our first interview was very successful. But some of the other interviews would bring us down and mess us up.

Our interviews followed rather successfully until the fifth interview (the most important one, as we were shortlisted for the design award). 30 minutes before our next match, we realised our match partners were the third best in the UK, but they were our biggest downfall. As they were overconfident about getting to Worlds (which they didn’t), they didn’t bother trying to practise; instead they waffled about their dating life, which none of us found helpful whatsoever. And when the match came, our low score dipped lower. To add insult to the injury - THEY BLAMED US!

We then began to test the autonomous program. After it successfully scored a decent amount of points, we decided to use one of our 3 attempts for the autonomous program. Guess what: the field that we ran it on was slightly damaged, and so autonomous didn't even score a single point. To our dismay, our next match was with a team called “Let him cook”, which sounded like a good team until we saw their robot - it was only 4 wheels! We still haven't figured out how they got to nationals. As expected, we scored 2 points. After a few more matches, we were ranked 16th in the 60 teams competing; this wouldn’t stay the same for long though.

After sleeping at 2 am due to our hard work that night, we woke up at 5:30 to the atrocious alarm blared once again and nearly everyone woke up in a cold sweat yet again. It was the final day of National’s. No autonomous runs had been run yet and time was running out. We rushed to the skills fields and ran our first autonomous skills run. However, our loader accidentally disqualified us by stepping into the field. After that, we were slightly humiliated, and decided to continue working on the code. We then did a 2nd autonomous run. Everything was wonderful until the catapult stopped working. Our team was tense because we only had one autonomous run. At noon, our team decided to give autonomous one last shot. However, autonomous failed us and got 0 points. Again. Autonomous never got a single point due to the irregular structure and terrain of the field. We then ranked 24th out of 30 in teamwork.

Since we didn’t get into the finals with a final autonomous score of 0, we watched the finals whilst biting our fingernails, hoping to win one measly award. However, it was futile; we came out with nothing physically. Mentally, however, we learnt so much about robotics, about coding, and most importantly, about all the friendships that we made. We drove back to school, ate at a service station and finally arrived at 10 pm with elated parents welcoming us back; therefore, bringing an end to this spectacular journey.

Overall, this path for VEX IQ RC was spectacular. We strongly recommend you to do VEX IQ RC when you are in Year 9 if you do not have a life whilst loving robotics.