15 minute read
Teaming Up for a VEXing Challenge | Members
Teaming Up for a VEXing Challenge
Interview by Erin E. Berg
Advertisement
The VEX Robotics Club is one of the most popular extracurricular activities at Roxbury Latin. Each winter, student coders, engineers, and problem-solvers from all classes come together forming teams in which to design, build, and program robots with specific goals in mind, to compete against teams from other schools. As was true with all activities this past year, VEX looked different during COVID. With students assigned to “neighborhoods” by class, with hybrid instruction keeping cohorts apart physically, and with no ability to compete in-person against other schools in large venues, RL’s VEX teams adapted—and adapted well. The team of Josh Krakauer, Vishnu Emani, Oliver Wyner, Jacob Tjaden, and Max Williams (all Class II) were one of 12 teams in the Southern New England region to qualify for the World Championship competition, with their high Remote Skills score, which included both a oneminute completely autonomous score, and a one-minute driver-controlled score. (In short: Each VEX competition includes instructions on how to build a “field” as well as the various ways in which a team can score points using their robot—which the team builds, on their own, from scratch. Scoring possibilities can include stacking items, putting balls through hoops, or flipping flags to your own team’s color. Teams compete in both autonomous—or, fully programmed—and driver-controlled elements.)
At this spring’s World Championship competition—in which the team competed virtually during the third week in May—the boys finished fifth out of 24 in their division, which placed them in the quarterfinals. While the team didn’t progress past the quarterfinals, they had a strong showing in the divisional round against some top-notch competitors, and proved—throughout a modified season— their skills in adaptability, creativity, and positivity. With next year’s VEX game and requirements already released, the team of rising seniors is already planning and strategizing for the upcoming season. All five boys and their VEX faculty advisor, Nate Piper, answered questions about why they love what they do, and what this particular year entailed for them.
What’s so great about VEX? Why do you love it, and why do you keep coming back to it?
Josh Krakauer: I’ve been involved in VEX since seventh grade at Roxbury Latin. From the moment I started, I have loved the idea of challenging myself with every kind of problem solving—whether that's building or planning out different things with the team. That combination of teamwork and problem solving is what keeps me coming back each year.
Vishnu Emani: The biggest things for me are the community and the teamwork, as Josh mentioned. I have a team and a group of friends that I really enjoy going to the lab with and working with and problem solving with, and I feel comfortable adding my input without worrying about any other weird dynamics. I feel very comfortable with this group, and that’s another thing that makes me really excited to be part of it.
Oliver Wyner: I second that, as well. I joined VEX for a few weeks in my Sixie year, but freshman year is the first time I really got into it, because we split into smaller groups. (We started with 10 kids on the team, which was too many to get things done.) At that point, it felt much more like I was a part of things. It felt much more like a team.
Max Williams: This is the first year I’ve really been able to help out. I tried to get involved freshman year, but I was also doing wrestling and other things. However, this year I feel like I've been able to be a meaningful part of it. Although I feel more than contributing, I’ve just really learned a lot—about the process, the coding, what goes into it, and how we can succeed in building a successful robot.
Jacob Tjaden: One of the reasons I really like VEX is because you start from nothing. You have just this general goal, but there are endless possibilities of how to go about accomplishing it. There are very few opportunities, at least at this age, where a completely student-run organization can just come together and collectively try to work and find the best way to do something with all these endless possibilities. And doing that as a group, as everyone else said, is a really special experience.
Are there different expertises, roles, or insights that you each bring to this problem that needs to be solved from a lot of different angles?
Vishnu: There are basically three main areas in which people bring expertise from different angles. The first one is building. You have to have solid building and structure, a stable robot. The second thing is programming. That’s especially important for the autonomous period—when the robot is moving on its own—but also during the driver-control period, making sure all the functionality is nice and clean. The third is driver control, which is where a lot of teams fall short. Lots of teams have really good robots, but their drivers aren’t as skilled. I’ll just say, this year we started off with a pretty preliminary, almost prototype, robot, and we went at it first try. And Oliver, who’s just a really, really good driver, almost made a Worlds scoring score just from that. So if you can make up in some areas with other strengths, that’s always helpful.
Do those specific strengths and skills emerge organically? How do you decide who will be leading in which of those three important areas?
Josh: The process of creating the robot usually goes from building, to coding, to driving, and along the way, usually people take leads. But I would say every single person is involved in every aspect, to some extent. When we’re building, for instance, everyone is providing input. Sometimes I like to take the lead when we build, but I also make sure to take input from others and share what I’m doing. The same goes for coding. Vishnu usually does the majority of our coding. I’m not necessarily that great at coding, but I’ll still give input when I think it’s valuable, and so do Jacob and Max and Oliver. Even in driving, everyone’s able to help out Oliver and say, “You should maybe go for this path, or that path.” And if you’re not especially skilled in one area, you can learn a lot from everyone else on the team. And you can still provide ideas, even though it might not be your strong suit.
Mr. Piper: Would you guys agree that the fourth area that ties it all together is the strategy of the game? Josh: Yeah, for sure. And every single person on the team is incredibly helpful with that. Because maybe one person is convinced, “We should go for this point system first,” and then someone else will take a step back and say, “Well, what about this?” and that will change everything.
Vishnu: This year there were fewer ways to actually score points—there was pretty much only one task. But the strategy was deciding what order to do it in. What goal do you start with? What path do you take? And that plays into a lot of things, including the building. We don’t just say, “Okay, the robot is finished,” and then move on to the next thing. Instead we say, “Hey, we’re noticing this is taking too long to, say, clean out all the balls. Is it possible that we can change the spacing so that we can have it go out the back?” Something like that. The elements of a successful robot are all connected, as Mr. Piper was saying, by the strategy.
Mr. Piper: Josh, do you want to talk about that specific thing you were showing me yesterday?
Josh: Sure. One thing I’ve been working on lately has been spacing of certain rollers. So that instead of only having a two-way system for balls to go in and out of the robot, we can also spit them out the back. That’s one example of, even though the robot works, we still cycle back to the building phase—even though we might consider the robot to be in working condition. All aspects of the robot are constantly changing, and we’re trying to constantly make it better in every aspect.
Max: I think that’s important. When you look at the grand scheme of things, most teams have a very similar base design. You have the two wheel intakes and then an arm to shoot the ball. But you need to be willing—and able— to figure out how to improve on that design and setup, determining what works best for your team to score the maximum number of points. That process requires revisiting a robot you might have already deemed “complete.”
So, are you ever finished with your robot? Or do you find that you’re going back and tweaking every time you test it, every time you compete?
Oliver: We might be satisfied to an extent, but there are always problems. We might identify three issues, and we then fix two of them to see how that works as a whole.
Vishnu: Exactly. Also—and we were talking about this earlier—we feel like if we were ever actually able to get our robot to a place where we physically can’t improve it in any way, it would either take years or we would just be too bored to continue with it. Because we’re obviously not the experts of the experts. Take coding, for instance: Currently our autonomous uses the last second of the time we’re given because we don’t max out [in earning possible points]. But even if we were able to max out, maybe there’s a way that we can make turning faster—like creating a method to turn without stopping. It’s going to take a long time to perfect that, but once you perfect that there’s something else we can do to make it faster. There’s always something we can do to improve.
Josh: Also, no matter how good we make our robot, there will always be other robots that are doing some aspects better than we are. And so one of the big things—which is harder this year, but has been huge in the past—has been looking at other robots and taking ideas and talking with other teams. Before COVID, going to so many competitions and seeing other robots up close was so valuable. Because even though you might think our intake is perfect, we'll look at another robot and think, “Wow, that’s better than ours.” So, I don’t think we ever get to a spot where our robot is finished, because, as Vishnu said, there are always ways to make it better.
When you’re competing in-person with teams from other schools, how collaborative are people willing to be versus how protective of their knowledge and skills?
Oliver: From my experience, VEX and robotics in general rely on using other people as a resource. I don’t think I’ve run into a team that’s been like, “Oh, no, you cannot look. We have a box over our robot.”
Worcester Polytechnic Institute hosts its regional signature VEX event, called WAVE, each spring (photo credit: WPI).
Josh: One of the biggest competitions last year was at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and that competition was amazing. We saw some of the best robots I’ve ever seen in person. And there wasn’t a single team that wasn’t extremely happy to explain its robot to me. There were teams, too, that would constantly say, “You can take a picture of our robot, if you want.” I gained so much knowledge from so many other people. I think the whole community, like Oliver said, not even just in VEX, but in robotics in general, is super happy to explain stuff.
Because you didn’t have the opportunity to compete in-person this year, can you tell me what competing virtually was like? How are you logistically competing against other teams right now?
Oliver: So of the two “competitions” that we've been to this year, one was actually just a recording that we submitted. For the other, we were judged remotely—being observed in real time. But essentially, we just ran against the clock for 60 seconds. In both autonomous and in driver control, we just scored as many points as possible. The judge can see the field as it’s happening. For me, the competitions felt surprisingly loose, considering how strict they’ve been in the past. Worlds are live-remote: You’re competing from your own field, and there’s someone watching you live and in real-time. But you are competing at the same time as three other teams. One team is competing with you, and two other teams are competing against you. And you are working together, but also completely separately with your partner to score as many points as possible.
What are some of the pros and cons of virtual competition?
Vishnu: There are definitely some advantages and disadvantages to this setup. Obviously, the disadvantages are that we can’t have in-person competitions. In-person competitions are so fun. Nerve-wracking, but fun. But the nice thing is that we get to use the same field that we use in practice during the actual competition. Especially when it comes to something like autonomous, when things happen with the robot that even God can’t explain. Getting ready for the state competition, we had tested the robot for an entire week. It worked perfectly, almost maxed out. And then we went to the actual competition, and in all the three runs it just scored half of what it could have. So when you go to a different arena, and there’s, say, more dust on the
floor, your robot is turning too fast and you just can’t do anything about it. So we did have that benefit, that we knew exactly what field we were using.
Max: Although on the other hand, the field that we built was not perfect. We ran into several issues where mid-season we actually had to rebuild it, since we built many of the towers too dense and you couldn’t actually pull the balls out without significant effort. So mid-season we had to take out several of the towers and rebuild them, which was a pain. Also, a problem that we never really fixed was the balls would get stuck in the corners and be almost impossible to pull out. So, while having the same field over and over again was a good thing, it was also frustrating when the field would fail.
Oliver: For me, even though the virtual competitions take up less time technically, the actual aspect of strategizing in-game, fixing those problems, even the stress of the competition in person is a big part for me. I really enjoy it, and it’s tough not to have that. On top of that, we only have one scoring method this year, so in terms of game plan, there’s less problem solving to do.
Josh: I would say overall though, going into the season, I was very unsure of what it would look like. And I was worried, honestly, because I love this extracurricular so much. I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to do it this year. And I’m really grateful for the opportunity that RL gave us to actually get a robot not only working, but working well. This is not nearly a failed season. This was very successful for us, despite the many challenges.
Vishnu: Especially compared to what materials other teams have been given. I’m probably accurate in saying we wouldn’t have made it to Worlds if other teams were in school, in session. I think a lot of the teams that did really well this year did so in spite of the fact that they had to do it from home.
Mr. Piper: One of the fascinating things, I thought, was the remote competition. You’re competing with other people in the same Zoom room with the same judge, and you get to literally see into other people’s living rooms, where they set up the entire game board in their living room or their basement at home. To actually be in school was a major advantage. Jacob: The competition is actually released in the summer, for fall, but at RL VEX is a winter activity, so that late start puts us at a disadvantage. The curve of our performance is a lot steeper than most other teams. But being given this opportunity with RL to come in-person and have a normal-ish season, where lots of people were not given that opportunity, it shows how much more we can do in that small time.
Vishnu: It doesn’t relate to our specific robot, but another difficulty for me was not being able to help other teams at RL as much. That was something that I was really interested in doing, especially with the middle schoolers, because they need someone who has done it to help guide them. That was difficult because of the neighborhood situation, and we weren’t able to mix class neighborhoods for health reasons. I really would’ve liked to have been able to help other teams with that—but hopefully next year.
Mr. Piper, is there anything about this particular team that you would like to speak to?
Mr. Piper: I have admired this team’s commitment—not just to their own success, but to the ongoing success of the program. As Vishnu was talking about a little bit, these guys have not just the willingness, but also the desire to spend time with the younger guys and teach them the ropes. I know there were several consequential older members when these five were younger who provided that mentorship for them. Another thing that Josh and Vishnu, especially, didn't mention is that even before we were fully back, and before we had this space set up, they had actually brought a bunch of stuff home and said, “We want to make sure that we can do something. Even if we’re not going to have a full RL season, we still want to get a jumpstart on this.” They were all in on this commitment. Finally, just about the team more broadly: Jacob and Max were both new freshmen, joining a team that was already starting to congeal. Their being welcomed in, and their bringing fresh ideas and fresh blood, has been a cool thing to watch. To see both how these five have allocated their skills, and split their focus, and yet how they’re still all in the conversation together at every moment is really impressive and enjoyable to watch. //
