After four months of competitions and 24 qualifying matches, the Twentynine Palms Junior High School SteamCats2 Robotics team was ranked seventh out of 35 teams. That ranking qualified the team to play in the California High Desert Vex Robotics Middle School League Finals in Hesperia Saturday. In Vex Robotics competitions, each school’s teams design and build a robot to play against other teams in a game-based engineering challenge. Teams are paired and compete as an alliance against two other teams in single elimination. Managing editor Tami Roleff has more about the SteamCats2 and their competition…
In the Sweet 16 round, the Twentynine Palms SteamCats2 alliance beat their opponents 19-11, and they advanced to the quarter finals. The SteamCats2 won that round as well, 14 to 8. However, in the semifinals round, the SteamCats ran into trouble when their robot suffered a mechanical failure, which ended up costing the team four points. The team spent the next minute and 45 seconds doing everything they could to help their alliance score more points, but at the end, those missing four points cost them the win, as they lost 15-12. However, the team rallied and won third place, 12-8.
This year's team is a very young team with only two returning members from last year. All members help build and revise the structure of the robot. Drivers were Jacob Ne Ville and Adynn Mintz with backup drivers Daniel
Rodrigues and Jordyn Banda. The programmer was Nathaniel Thomas, who was able to make major advances to the robots' function both in the autonomous section and driver control. The manager and historian was Gilbert Chavez. Support members were Rory Morning, Ian Godley, Cole Velasquez, Logan Erhardt, Moses Williams and Lowen Baird.
