Tuesday 3 March 2026
The last weekend of February saw our keen robotics team compete at the VEX Robotics Nationals. Any good engineer knows that you don't change design at the last minute... so our team rebuilt their robot on Friday night! They spent most of Saturday morning finding and fixing errors - by lunchtime they were sitting dead last in the rankings, not having won a match but all was not lost…
Improvement through the afternoon resulted in a couple of wins and a couple of losses ending up with a ranking of 55th out of 71 teams - things were still not looking very promising.
Sunday morning came and things started looking up with a couple of good wins against more highly ranked opponents, but after a couple of losses and the team finished 44th sure that they were out of range of range for selection into an alliance for the knockout stages but some smart diplomacy over the lunch break and alliance selection saw them picked as part of the eighth seeded alliance and the game was on!
They achieved a clear victory in the round of 16 heading into the quarter finals against the top seeds. In a close battle they were ahead with seconds to go - but some last-minute scoring by the top seeds and the game was lost - or was it?
The judges conferred, discussed, debated and concluded that both sides had infringed the rules and called for a rematch. Unfortunately, this proved to be much of a replay from the first match - ahead with seconds to go but just pipped at the end.
Congratulations to our team of Ray Zhang (Year 12, Greenbank), Jamie Ye (Year 12, Greenbank), Tiger Yu (Year 11, Averill) and Aiden Guo (Year 10, Marsden) for their resilience and robotics success.