Corcoran VEX Robotics Teams to Compete at World Championship

Two groups of Corcoran students will be traveling to Louisville, KY in April to compete in the VEX World Championships.
 
To qualify, these teams took on 72 high school teams at the Northern New York State Championship. Competing in the Tower Takeover challenge, teams were tasked with attaining a higher score than opposing alliances by placing cubes in towers and scoring cubes in goal zones.
 
One team, Team 5221C (Thomas La, Aphone Paing, Connor Shanahan, Sam Livingston and Max Gingold), won the second highest award, the Design Award. The Design Award is given to the team with the best Engineering Notebook and judges interview, and this was the team’s fifth award this season!
 
“It’s our first time to Worlds, and it means everything,” senior Aphone Paing said. “Last year, we didn’t qualify – but this year, we were more determined and focused. We’re testing and trying to make little improvements on our robot and just trying to improve from the state championships. I really enjoy the challenge of VEX. You go into every match not knowing what’s going to happen, and you come away understanding what went wrong and how you can improve upon it.”
 
Team 5221B (Kayla Nguyen, Dakota Smith, Jesse Gallipeau, Joshua Williams Jr., and Kara Shanahan) won the highest overall award, the Excellence Award. The Excellence Award is given to the top team in multiple categories, including Design Award/Engineering Notebook, Skills Challenge scores and qualification ranking. The team has won two awards at every tournament this season!
 
“It’s really cool to make it to Worlds… to see everyone’s hard work pay off,” sophomore Kara Shanahan said. “I didn’t have as much of an interest in STEM and engineering before starting VEX, but I enjoy working with others and the expression of ideas. It’s nice because you go over every problem, you look over it and you come up with a bunch of ways that you could solve it to determine the best solution. The teamwork and problem solving really appeal to me!”
 
Both Corcoran teams were the only teams at the State competition that double qualified for the World Championships. Congratulations to these talented students!