DuBois Area High School, they participated in two separate robotics contests in a year. BEST Robotics is in the fall and we have a team of 25 to 28 kids who all work on one robot and marketing plan. VEX Robotics begins for us after BEST ends (usually in November). With VEX, students form teams of 3 or 4 and each builds their own robot to compete. This year, they had 4 VEX Robotics teams who competed. They qualified for World Championships.
The team found out during the Awards presentation that two of the DUBois teams qualified for the World Championships. “The Mad Scientists” team of Jack Stringer (grade 9), Aiden Via (grade 9), and Derrick Weber (grade 8) won the Innovate Award for their approach to their robot design. This team was also undefeated in the preliminary rounds and went into the elimination rounds in 2nd place. They, unfortunately, lost in the quarterfinals.
Team “99 problems” also qualified. That team is made up of Tyler Baughman (grade 11), Madison DeLarme (grade 12), Justin Rake (grade 10), and CJ Mowrey (grade 10). This team qualified on their Skills score. Skills are when the team is on a game field by themselves and has 60 seconds to score as many points as possible. They must complete a 60-second round of a driver controlling the robot and a 60-second round of the robot running autonomously. Their autonomous score was the 2nd highest in the Western PA all season and the highest at this state competition. Because another team “double qualified” by winning the tournament and a judged award, 99 Problems was then invited to World Championships.
World Championships are held in Dallas, TX April 25-27, 2023. We will compete against teams from six different continents and over 43 countries. Last year, there were roughly 700 teams in the high school division alone. This competition is sponsored internationally by Google, NASA, Tesla, Texas Instruments, and T-Mobile just to name a few. But we could always use local support to help offset the travel costs for our students. If there are businesses or individuals who would like to help sponsor us, they can make a donation to the “DAHS Physics Club” which is the student club through which we fundraise. We will also have fundraisers to help us generate the funds we need to fly ourselves and the robots to Dallas!
