Oxford High School hosted the regional qualifier for FIRST Tech robotics on Tuesday which brought together nine teams from across the south east to compete for places in the national finals in June. Teams had to design, build and program robots to carry out a series of challenges posed by this year’s competition. True to the competition’s slogan of ‘More than Robots’, teams also had to raise sponsorship, carry out outreach, and document the whole process in an online Engineering Portfolio. This year the team, Cubotics, raised generous sponsorship from TJC and Oxford Dynamics.
Oxford High School is a Champion Organisation for the competition, helping to support the running of the competition, and we have encouraged and supported many new teams to take part. Most of the teams at our event were competing for the first time this year.
Each round of the competition sees teams paired up with a second team forming an alliance, competing against a second alliance, each aiming to complete the challenges and score points. For the first 30 seconds the robots are programmed to drive themselves, and are then human-driven for the remaining 2 minutes. Cubotics performed very well, winning all their qualifier matches and making it through to the final, where the format was the best of 3 competitions. This proved extremely tense and came down to the deciding third match. The drivers held their nerve and helped achieve the highest score of the day, securing their place in the national finals. They also collected the Think Award for their explanation of the engineering process they went through as described in their Engineering Portfolio.
