Throughout the winter, the school’s Vex (VRC) robotics team, also known as the Cavalry, enjoyed a successful season, with several tournament wins and the victory of the Eastern Pennsylvania state championship for the first time in recent years.
In late April, the team sent team 169A, consisting of Sixth Former Max Zhang, Fifth Formers Conor McDonald and Elliot Lee, and Fourth Former Jack Ford, to the VRC World Championships.
At World’s, around 800 qualified teams from across the globe competed for three days at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas.
The teams, divided randomly into ten divisions, play each other in hopes of becoming the next world champion.
169A looked to test their skill against the best teams in the world.
“The goal going into Worlds was to make eliminations and hopefully win a division,” Fifth Former Conor McDonald said.
Each match consists of a fifteen-second autonomous period and a minute and forty-five-second driver period. In the autonomous period, robots move based entirely on code, and in the driver period, students control their robots.
After ten qualification matches, which rank teams based on their success in the autonomous period and in the driver period, 169A ranked seventeenth out of eighty-two teams in the Science division.
“Our qualifications weren’t the best,” Fourth Former Jack Ford said. “We made a ton of mistakes while playing against some really good teams.”
The team relied on their autonomous period to rise higher in the ranking.
Ford, despite being a first-year robotics member, played a large part in the team’s success by writing the robot’s code.
“It’s a lot of pressure to have a super important part of the competition all be on you,” Ford said. “It was super cool to see our [autonomous period] be super consistent.”
The team finished with a record of 6-4 and entered the elimination rounds as the fifteenth seed out of sixteen.
“We were pretty happy with making eliminations even as a low seed,” McDonald said. “Making the top sixteen at Worlds is a pretty big achievement, considering that every team at Worlds is competitive.”
The team lost in the elimination round, knocking them out of the tournament.
“I think we lost because we just spent too much time working on the wrong stuff,” McDonald said. “We probably could have done a different robot design as well.”
However, they still see the season as a success.
“Our goal at the beginning of the season was to win States, which we did,” McDonald said. “It’s pretty frustrating to not win anything at Worlds, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s always next season.”
“w”We need to be helping the team so it continues to do well after we’re gone.”
Conor McDonald ’25
Both McDonald and Ford are already thinking about ways of improving the whole team for the next season. Ford is looking to expand his coding repertoire to help the team as a whole.
“I’m going to try and figure out how to code stuff for more complicated things like odometry and maybe make a library from scratch for the whole team, not just for [169A], to use,” Ford said. “It’ll make using more complex code a lot more accessible, especially for new teams.”
McDonald also looks to create resources to keep building the team.
“We’re thinking about making some guides about some commonly used mechanisms,” McDonald said. “Lifts and intakes, for example, so teams have examples to follow when they build their first robots next season.”
McDonald is also planning ahead, knowing that next season is his last year in VRC.
“Next year’s our last year,” McDonald said, “so we need to be helping the team so it continues to do well after we’re gone.”
