Lamar University’s Robotic Cardinals student organization, along with the College of Engineering, held its second High Stakes Vex Robotic tournament for high schoolers, Oct. 31, in the Science and Technology Building.
The high school students designed and built robots throughout the semester for the tournament. The goal of the game is to score points by placing rings on stakes, placing mobile goals in positive/negative corners, and climbing a ladder.
Each round lasts two minutes and the robots navigate the course via pre-programmed instructions to score bonus points. There is also a driver-controlled period, where the students get to manually control the robot.
The league consisted of three high school teams from Memorial High School, Buna High School and the Texas Academy for Leadership in the Humanities at Lamar University. The teams competed for a chance to qualify for a spot in VEX regionals.
Bobby Barton, one of the coordinators for the event, said he was pleased with how the league turned out.
“It’s going awesome,” he said. “It’s really exciting to see us being able to provide an opportunity for these students in our local high schools to compete. They get to come here for four weekdays, play some matches, then go home, and at the end of November we’ll be hosting a really big tournament, so it’s great.”
Jordan Vazquez, Memorial High School senior, said he felt good about his team’s performance.
“I do think we could have done better in certain aspects,” he said. “But we have made a lot of progress, and we’ve learned a lot when it comes to rules and how to play the game. There’s a lot of improvement needed for our team, but we’ve been doing so good so far.”
Gabriel Kirkwood, TAHL junior, said he enjoyed the event.
“The staff here and the volunteers here at Lamar put on a really great event,” he said. “I love it. Everybody’s great. For sure, we have some hiccups that we gotta fix moving forward, but overall, we’re taking the hits and moving forward. I’m really proud of the team and how far we’ve come so far.”
