The students of the Techna PWN Robotics Team put up an impressive show along with their robot, named Sheila, at the VEX World Robotics Competition, which was held at Orlando.
Sheila Robot
The team members were a group of home-schooled students who worked on developing robots dedicated to specific tasks. There were more than 3,500 teams participating in the competition. They were among the top teams at the close of the competition, which had teams participating from China, New Zealand, Canada, Spain, Mexico and United states.
This year’s competition was called Round Up, the test for the robots was to put the coloured tubes assigned to their teams into little poles and to be able to hang it from a ladder. There were four divisions of teams with each division consisting of 104 teams. The names of the divisions were derived from STEM, which is an initiative to promote science, technology, engineering and math. The Techna team was successful in winning six out of the nine Engineering qualification division and got into a tie with a three-team alliance from the Omega Gross High School.
The members of the Techna PWN team were Dalynn Hatfield, Noah Morse, Josiah Krutz, Nathaniel Bunch, Ryan Tweedt and Ryan Plummer. The team was coached by Jeff Krutz, Steve and Doug Tweedt. The students started working on their robots in the fall, when the schools begin. Teams that won a regional competition or won an Excellence Award at the regional level only qualified for participating in the VEX World Level competition. The teams are required to get into a partnership with others and work together in building winning strategies. The participants learn a lot of life skills such as team work, sportive spirit etc.