Last week, the Malibu High School (MHS) robotics team competed and won an award at the VEX “Nothing But Net” World Championships in Louisville, Kentucky.
After winning both regional and state tournaments, the MHS robotics team and advisor Brian Corrigan missed four days of school to travel across the country to the Louisville Exposition Centre to compete against 500 top high school teams from around the globe in the largest robotics competition.
“It was a really cool experience,” junior and co-captain Sam Burton explained. “The venue was huge, so everything was way scaled up.”
The event broke the Guinness World Record for the largest robotics tournament in the world with over 1,075 teams (including elementary) from 30 different nations, according to Guinness World Records.
While the four-man team did not place in the finals, they did not leave without some recognition for their stellar talent. By the end of the tournament, they took home the “Think Award,” which is given to the team with the most “impressive and effective autonomous programming,” according to the VEX Robotics competition.
“Most teams take three or four years to get to Worlds for the first time, so most teams think that we’ve been doing this for multiple years,” co-captain Harry Putterman, who will attend the California Institute of Technology in the fall, said. “I’m pretty proud of the fact that we got to Worlds in a little over six months.”
The goal was to design a robot that could shoot balls as quickly as possible into a net. Teams were randomly paired together to form alliances in order to shoot the most baskets. The World Championships brought an additional challenge as points were awarded to teams that could lift their fellow robot off the ground.
“One of the main troubles that other teams have is driving [the robot] onto [the platform] because some were too wide and drivers had trouble twisting [the] robot into place,” junior Izzy Putterman explained.
After many close attempts, the team was able to lift their fellow robot.
“Finally, in the last match at Worlds that we had, we lifted our team’s robot,” Izzy added.
The boys started off strong, winning all three of their matches the first day. With hard games the following days, the team faced adversity as they were paired with alliances who could not pull their weight. In one game, the team’s allied robot did not turn on.
“I would’ve liked to end winning more competitions because I was kind of dismayed by the fact that the randomness of the alliances matters so much, but it was still really much more than I expected,” Harry shared. “One game, we scored 190 points by ourselves, and our teammate’s robot did not turn on. We only needed four more balls to win.”
After coming home to a proud high school, the team sees the experience as a learning curve and hopes to use it to help them in the future.
“It’s just a great accomplishment,” junior Jaime Le said. “It allows us to actually have tangible results of what we do and not just say we are a club, but say that we do things that entice other kids to join the club and want to be a part of it.” Le hopes to expand the club for next year.
The boys feel confident that they can fix their mistakes and build on their accomplishments, with the end goal of competing on a global scale for another year.
After competing alongside teams coming from as far as China and Puerto Rico, these Malibu locals are inspired to take their team to the next level.
“Just seeing the mechanical precision they had in the finals and how efficient their robots were and how they barely had any mechanical errors in their robots was pretty inspiring,” Harry said. “And it was cool that our robot was almost on the same level as theirs.”
With over 600 hours invested into this year’s robotic endeavors, the MHS team has achieved five awards across different categories. They have won the VEX Judge’s Award, the Tournament Award, the Excellence Award, the Design Award and, most recently, the Think Award.
“To see that amount of work actually lead to something was so great,” Corrigan shared.
With the help of local founder Tarek Shraibati, advisor Corrigan and their own devoted efforts, the MHS robotics team has high hopes for next year.
“Looking back on the whole experience, I don’t really remember so much the bad things that happened like losing most of our matches, but I think I remember the good things like the first day we won all of them and winning the award, the scale of the event and all the international teams,” Burton concluded.
