Northwood students are programming their dreams into reality with Technodream 50881A as the school’s first ever private VEX robotics team, officially launched last September.
Every year at state qualifying tournaments, teams in the VEX robotics league build robots that perform a series of functions, allowing them to score points. This year’s game “High Stakes” required teams to create ladder mechanisms and collect colored rings onto stakes.
“It was a really successful year for a first-year robotics team,” Robotics Club president and Technodream50881A Team Manager junior Jia Dave said. “They learned so much and got praise for their notebook and their robot build at almost every tournament we went to.”
The nine-member founding team won back-to-back Judges Awards and made it to quarterfinals at three California Region 4 tournaments. In preparation for their competitions, the team met multiple times a week during the season to study the game rules, strategize, program the robots’ autonomous code and test their designs.
While some of the team had prior experience from Lego robotics, many were new to VEX and learned the process behind the tournaments while programming over the summer.
“Learning VEX was a little bit of a struggle at first, but Jia helped so much, and more of the struggles were just getting funds,” main programmer and driver freshman Kailey Yoon said. “Improving upon my coding skills and learning from people who are really experienced and know what they’re doing is really fun.”
While Northwood’s Robotics Club, started by Dave in 2022, allowed students to begin exploring VEX robotics on campus, the club lacked adequate funding from ASB to form an official, non-school-affiliated competition team until this year.
Now, after hosting tryouts in March 2024, acquiring ASB funds and partnering with local sponsors like Simply Orthodontics, Technodream 50881A is able to compete as a private VEX robotics team. Their competitions allowed them to improve their coding abilities as well as collaborate with other VEX robotics teams in their assigned match alliances.
“I really like the people on our team,” Yoon said. “It’s really fun hanging out with them because I know that we’re all devoted to the team effort, and we’re in the struggle together.”
After their first successful season, the team hopes to continue winning state qualifying tournaments this upcoming year and possibly advance towards states and the World Championship in Dallas, Texas.
Applications for the 2024-2025 Technodream 50881 team have been extended to May 9 and can be found on Northwood’s Robotics Club instagram @technodream50881. Tryouts will begin the same day, and the details for next year’s game, “Push Back,” will also be released by VEX robotics. To learn more about robotics and engineering design, visit Northwood’s Robotics Club during lunch on odd Fridays in Room 1123.
