‘Battle of the Bots’ hosted on Bristol Motor Speedway campus
BRISTOL, Tenn. (WJHL) – On Friday and Saturday, the first ‘Battle of the Bots’ competition took place at Bristol Motor Speedway.
The event, sponsored by Vex Robotics and Sullivan County Schools, sees robotics teams from across the United States and Ontario, Canada go head-to-head for a chance to compete at the Vex Robotics World Championship in Dallas, Texas.
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The preparation for the event begins the year before.
“At the end of world’s every year, Vex Robotics will introduce a new game,” said Margaret Trent, a STEM teacher at Sullivan East Middle School and host of the event. “At the end of April, [the students are] already starting to think about what the game is going to be and what their designs will be.”
The process of designing, assembling and programming the bots takes time. Trent said the students spend much of their summer and the entirety of competition season working on their bots.
“They will build it, they will test it, program the robots to work on their own,” said Trent. “Then they go into the competitions and they start working, seeing how well those robots work in the local competitions before they go back, they revisit the engineering design process, making new iterations to their design. And it’s an all-year-long process.”
The students learn important skills aside from designing. They learn things such as teamwork and communication– all things necessary for a professional job in STEM.
“They learn to work as a team, to come up with an idea, how to decide whether ideas are the right one,” said Trent.
“A lot of it is communication,” said Lucas Carr, who teaches technology at Sullivan East High School. “I feel like there’s a lot of soft skills that kids pick up from this program.”
The students also feel that they learn a variety of skills through this event.
“Judges come up and talk to us,” said Sullivan East Middle School eighth-grader Dalton Gross. “We have to learn how to communicate with them and also come up with different strategies and gameplay.”
“I’ve learned to use the engineering design process with problems even outside of robotics,” said Lillyan Epperson, an eighth grader from Sullivan East Middle School.
The teams are put into ‘alliances’, working alongside groups of people they have never met. The students said they form friendships with those they play with and against.
“Everybody we’ve met this tournament has been very friendly,” said Levi Singleton, an eighth grader from Sullivan East Middle School. “Even the people on the opposing alliance during matches, doesn’t matter where they’re from, they’re all super friendly. You make friends immediately.”
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One team, calling themselves the Department of Microwave Repair, traveled from Pembroke Pines, Florida to compete. They said they’ve noticed a change in how the teams in this area compete.
“The matches are played a lot differently,” said high school senior Nikhil Sangamkar from DMR. “We noticed that in our region, the matches are a lot more offensive. But here, the matches are much more defensive.”
Jonathan Kim, a high school senior on team DMR, said the competition truly helps them build skills alongside the other teams.
“Getting to talk to teams and strategizing allows us to learn a big part of compromising,” Kim said. “It allows us to learn to compromise with others, our strengths and our weaknesses, to form a really good alliance.”
Along with finding growth in competing, students said they genuinely enjoy the competitions and find fun in the little things throughout the day.
The winning teams from today’s competition will go on to compete in Dallas from April 25 to May 3.
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