Hi, we are Emma and Rhea and we are the authors of this Girl Power Story book. We are a part of VEX IQ Team 359A Waialua Robotics, The Hawaiian Kids. We are trying to reach out to other girls and inspire them to participate in robotics, and STEM. W...
Our first robot was a simple forklift type of robot. We knew that we wanted to pick up the hex balls off the fence and score them in the elevated goals. This would be more efficient than a clawbot, and we could potentially score a lot of points. Rhea and Emma often stayed later than the boys to work on developing and improving the robot. We worked hard to stand out on the team, and show that even if we are girls, we can do things just as good as boys can, if not better.
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This is our current robot design. It is a very simple fork lift robot.
After a couple of tournaments, we observed the other robots, and we saw them getting better and better. Our robot was good, but we had to step up our game. So we looked at ways to improve our robot. We came up with the idea of flipping our forks upside down. The forks are arched, and we had them in a way where it would scoop up the hex balls off the fence. We were only able to pick up two hex balls at a time. Now our forks are arched the opposite way and we can pick up four hex balls at a time. The arch keeps two hex balls in the back of the forks, so when we go to score the hex balls, only two fall into the goals instead of all four. Now, in driver skills, we can score 65 points instead of 55 points. Unfortunately we need an even better robot for states. So, what are we going to do?
So far we have gone to 6 tournaments. Our first competition was the 2016 Hawaii VEX IQ Pan Pacific Championship. During that tournament it was stressful and scary because it was our first competition and we learned how intense competitions are. It was stressful because we had the our field set up wrong so that affected our program and our driver's routine. During the Pan Pacific tournament we won the Teamwork Champion Award and the Think Award. For our finals match we got paired up IPA (Island Pacific Academy) and we were in first place because we earned a total of 60 points. So far we have won 3 Excellence Awards, 2 Teamwork Champion Awards, 3 Robot Skills Champion Awards, 2 Teamwork Finalist Awards, 2 Think Awards, and 1 STEM Research Project Award. Our whole team, especially Rhea and Emma worked hard to earn all of these achievements.
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This is a picture of one our matches at the Pan Pacific tournament
