Crescent Valley High School robotics places 33rd in World Championship

The Crescent Valley High School robotics team qualified for this year’s World Championship. The local robotics team came in third in the Pacific Northwest district competition between selected high schools in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. 

“There are district competitions,” said Josh Fan, a senior and current team captain of the Crescent Valley robotics team. “It’s essentially a tournament. You play and you get a certain amount of district points. The better you do, the higher you rank, essentially.”

The Crescent Valley robotics team has over 50 members with different subteams each dedicated to a different aspect of robotics. There are electrical teams, programming, design, spear marketing and business. 

After each team is presented with the year’s challenge, they have six weeks to come up with strategies and designs to win the competition. This year’s challenge involved picking cones up off the ground and stacking them all together. 

“There is a lot of running into each other,” Fan said. “You’ll see bumpers on the robots that will help make sure that when you run into a robot it doesn’t immediately break everything. But there will be a lot of clashes here and there.” 

“You’ve got six robots on the field. Depending on how good your driver is, you may run into a lot of defense,” added Fan. 

With large robots on the field, some of them about 2.5 feet tall, each champion needs to employ a gracious professionalism, ensuring that they won’t harm another team’s robot on purpose.

Generally speaking, breaking somebody else’s robot is a big no-no,” said Fan enthusiastically.  

Currently, the CV robotics team will compete in an international competition with teams from different countries.

“We’ll see a lot of Mexican teams; there are a lot of Israeli teams. I think there are a few teams from Switzerland,” said Fan. 

The robotics team isn’t just concerned with making the most efficient robot. The team’s business and marketing groups make sure that they have enough funding and sponsors to be able to attend and compete in prestigious competitions. 

Richard Chen, a junior, is the current business captain for the CV robotics team. His job is to meet with potential sponsors to present them with the team’s design and goals. 

“We put their names on our t-shirts and our robot as a way of giving back,” Chen explained. This year, one of the sponsors is the hardware company Hewlett-Packard. 

“I’m really excited just to see so many other teams,” said Chen about going to the World Championship.

“It’s gonna be super exciting,” said Meg Barstow, a sophomore from the electrical team. “It’s not local, it’s international so I think that’s probably going to be the most exciting part.” 

The robotics team recently returned from the competition, having traveled to Houston for this year’s World Championship during the third week of April. The Crescent Valley team placed 33 out of 70 teams in their division. 

“There were 8 divisions, with about 70 teams in each. In total (there were) about 600 teams. We were 30th in our division,” explained Barstow.