International Robotics Competition

I lead one robotics exploration per year in order to advance the robot building skills of a select group of 10 students by competing in the VEX robotics competition in Taiwan and Bangkok. In the first year the team was split into 3 sub-teams; fundraising, mechanical and programming. The fundraising team was responsible for successfully raising $5000 by building a website, calling potential individual donors and getting in contact with potential corporate sponsors. The mechanical team was in charge of the geometry and function of the robot depending on the competition requirements and the programming team was responsible for programming these functions after learning a C programming language called RobotC. For our first time at the competition we were very successful as we won the judges award and were interviewed by a local technology media outlet. The article can be found here.

In the following year we had recruited a new team of 10 that had a 50/50 gender split. This was done as a gender equity measure in order to increase the equality of opportunity for all. Both teams competed very well. In the end the girls team was chosen to ally with one of the top teams of the competition and ended up taking 1st place!