Four robotics teams participated in “Halloween Madness,” a West Houston wide tournament, on Saturday, October 28.
“You have a robot and you get allied with someone else in order to play a game against two other robots,” junior Jacqueline Arellano said. “If you beat the other team, then you advance to a higher ranking, and by the time you get to the finals of your top eight, then you go to quarterfinals.”
Arellano’s team ranked 19th out of the 54 teams that competed.
“[The tournament] was our first debut as a team, so I think we did good,” Arellano said.
Preparation for the tournament took extensive study and practice.
“We take the class period to break down the rules so that we know the challenge, what to expect with how to score, how to win the game, the size of the robots, [and] lengths of the match,” Robotics Teacher Rashad Mayes said. “The students have a chance to practice their computer coding both automatically and as drivers. After that, we take time to build the robot, and we use social media and the internet as examples to see how other teams in the country perform; we use that as inspiration for our robots for the game.”
This year, Langham Creek’s presence in robotics doubled, making the experience “more fun [with] more students to interact with,” Team Captain Isai Arteaga said.
“I know I can count on my teammates, so I don’t really have to worry about leading them or making sure they do something because they already know what their roles are and how to do it,” Arteaga said. “The only thing I worried about was making sure that they understood the rules so that there wasn’t any possibility of us being disqualified in any of the matches, and working out strategies with the drivers.”
With at least six more tournaments in the future, both the students and teacher have events to look forward to.
“[The best thing about being a robotics teacher is] seeing the looks on their [the students’] faces when they win-not even when they win, but when they see something works,” Mr. Mayes said. “It’s a great feeling to see that everything that is taught in class, they can now apply not just to the robotics games, but to the things that they wanna do in the future.”
