BIS HCMC robotics team build and programme two robots to compete at their first VEX Tournament

If you don’t know what VEX is, it is a worldwide competitive STEAM competition with Robotics at its heart. Once BISHCMC opened again after COVID-19 we had three unassembled kits in school, our students have been building up their expertise and we now have two fully functional robots and are in a position to compete with other schools in HCMC and hopefully further afield. 

Early last Saturday morning 14 students, 3 staff and 2 robots all boarded a school bus and headed down to Saigon South International School to meet 14 other teams to show off our learning. It was a full day of scrimmages for our two team robots, unimaginatively named by Mr. Astbury BIS A and BIS B. 

SSIS had the arena set up on stage for the Tournament. The main aim of the game is to score more Tri-balls in opposing goals, whereby the team's robots have to locate, identify, pick up and transport the balls to the netted goals of the opposite side of the field. There are other challenges, such as firing the tri-balls across the field and having your robot climb a pole. There were 20 qualifying rounds where each team was paired with various other schools to ‘form an alliance’ to compete against another dual team in a tense 2 minutes. The first part of the scrimmage was where the robot had a 15-second autonomous period coded by the students to enable the robot to move without driver interaction. Once the timer pinged, the three students on stage were allowed to take control of the driving and try and get as many Tri-balls into the opponent's net within 1 minute 45 seconds. This was loud, boisterous and tense for all involved. It was also an opportunity for non-competing teams and other team members to learn from successful designs to adapt and alter our own robots to maximise our chance of winning in the next Qualifier.