Westview Team Astra is the current Colorado State Champion and is now heading for “Worlds” in Kentucky. They will compete at the VEX Robotics World Championships in Lexington on April 25-28. 

Team Astra is Sierra Bindseil, Aidan Hansell , Sam Shipman, Sam Fallon

         

 

                

At the US Open Championships the kids have pushed the limits of what they are capable of doing at a tournament that involved higher level machines from all over the country and some visiting from China.  Of the 89 teams in attendance, 27 of them are ranked in the top 200 teams in the World for Robot Skills.  So the field was pretty deep this year.Here is a quick recap of the last three years…

In 2016 and 2017 combined:
8 teams have gone to the US Open.
None of them were judged.1 of them made the top 20 in Robot Skills.
Highest rank in Qualifying matches was 27th.
1 team was selected for the Elimination rounds.
(That’s where top teams get to pick other teams to be their partners)

This year 2018:
In qualifying Astra finished 11th and became an alliance captain.
Caboose finished 20th and became an alliance captain.
Semicolon finished 37th and was picked by another alliance.
All 3 teams in the Elimination rounds.
Astra advanced to the quarterfinals before losing to the #1 seed.
Astra finished 5th in Robot Skills and Semicolon in 11th
Astra was selected for Judging
Caboose at one point was ranked #1 at 4-0
These kids just keep getting better and better.  With the focus now being on the Engineering Design Notebooks we have teams that are building better machines with changes that are being decided on based off of their observations and data collection.  Can’t wait for Worlds and then next year!
 

Astra (42nd) and Semicolon (41st) are both in the top 50 teams worldwide for Robot Skills rankings and Astra still has one more chance to improve as we have 2 weeks until the VEX Robotics World Championships.