Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts sent two teams to the recent Robotics Education & Competition Foundation VEX Robotics World Championship, where the girls’ team – competing at the national level in their first year as a team – placed 33rd out of 353 teams in the elementary division.
The boys’ team, competing at the World Championship for the second year, placed 41st out of 353 teams in the middle school division – a big improvement from their performance last year, when they placed in the 70th-80th range, said coach Scott Rosenow.
The boys’ VEX team, the CyberEagles, are Edward Ziedins, Jerald Arden Freeman, Justin Syler and Rohan Woodruff, from left. (Contributed photo)“Our teams did amazingly well,” Rosenow said. “It was a really good experience for them.”
The largest robotics event in the world, the VEX Robotics World Championship tasks teams with designing and building a robot to compete against other teams’ robots in a game-based engineering challenge. Open to students in third through eighth grades, VEX Robotics competitions are held year-round at the regional, state and international levels leading up to the World Championship.
Rosenow said his teams’ success is especially noteworthy considering the number of foreign teams competing with elaborate robots designed with a lot of assistance. Rosenow’s students did all the designing and building of the robots used in the competition, he said, though he taught them the programming methodology that allowed them to do so.