The St. John Robotics Team consists of 15 3^rd and 4^th grade students and are coached by Mrs. Abby Garber, Miss Jennifer Thomas and Mrs. Katie Fortier.

On Saturday, November 11^th, our Robotics Team competed in a competition with 23 teams. During the competition, the students are judged on driving the robot with a partner ( a team work challenge where you complete a challenge with another school), a skills test (complete by yourself), Team Notebook that journals the steps of building their robots, their STEM Project, and a Judge’s Interview. We even had one team win the Excellence Award. This means they did well in every aspect of the competition from their STEM Project, to each of their competitions. The winner of the Excellence Award automatically moves onto the State Competition.

The Excellence Award is the highest award presented in the Vex Robotics Competition. This award is present to the team the exemplifies overall excellence in creating a high quality Vex Robotics program.

Each of our 3 teams’ robots have to meet certain criteria when building their robots, and complete a challenge. This year’s challenge is Ringmaster. In 60 seconds teams need to move as many rings as possible to the scoring zone. Some of the criteria for the robots are the Robots can not be longer than 15” long, they have to be able to push rings across the board, and the teams need to design some way for the robot to be able to pick rings up off a post and put them on another one. Each ring moved is worth different points depending on where the rings get placed and how many of them are placed in the same location.

When asked why they enjoy the Robotics Team so much the students had the following answers.

“I like the competitions.” “I want to be able to go to the State Tournament and the World Champions.” “I get to learn about Engineering and it gets us ready for jobs.” “It’s a new learning experience and teaches us about teamwork.”