In November, Harker fifth graders Aaron Luo, Brandon Labio, Nathan Yee and Trisha Shivakumar won the Champion’s Award at the NorCal First Lego League robotics qualifying tournament. The team received the award for having top performances in all areas of the competition, including robot design, project and core values. The team’s performance also earned it a spot at the NorCal regional tournament.
Another team of Harker fifth graders — Ava Zarkesh, Ivanya Sadana, Risa Chokhawala and Urvi Singhvi — won the Judges Award and the ‘Rising Stars Award’ for setting an example for other teams and producing a solution for two very different problems while adhering to the competition’s core values.
The team later competed at the FLL NorCal Peninsula Championships, where it won the Robot Design Award. The award is given to a team whose robot performs consistently well in areas such as efficiency, durability and challenge missions.
In early December, eighth graders Ashwin Kuppahally, Adrian Liu, Vivek Nayyar, Kabir Ramzan and Om Tandon competed the VEX IQ Challenge robotics tournament in Los Altos, where they earned the Excellence Award, the competition’s highest honor. This award is given to teams who excel in criteria such as event challenges, teamwork and robot design. At a previous competition, the team qualified for the state championship and the US Open Robotics World event after being recognized for the top robot design. They will compete the VEX State Championships in March and the CREATE U.S. Open Robotics Championship the following month.
At the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) international final, held Nov. 8-10 in Hungary, sixth graders Aidan Okyar and Mikhil Kiran and their teammate achieved perfect scores in a competition to design a SMART city. The team’s final ranking, including its robots’ mission completion times, was 22nd out of 92 teams in the Regular Elementary category, which made the trio the highest-ranking team from the United States across every age group. Congratulations!
In mid-September, three Harker sixth graders took top spots at the World Robot Olympiad USA national championship in Sunnyvale. Kallie Wang and her teammates won first place in the elementary group (for ages 12 and under) in the regular category, and Mikhil Kiran and Aidan Okyar’s team placed third and won the best robot design award. As a result, both teams have been invited to the international finals in Hungary, set to take place in November.
Since its inaugural season in 2004, the World Robot Olympiad robotics competition has provided young people from more than 65 countries the opportunity to develop their design and problem solving skills. Each year it attracts more than 26,000 teams.
On March 3, team GetVexed, made up of Harker seventh graders Joe Li, Jordan Labio, Nathan T. Liu, Ramit Goyal and Sriram Bhimaraju placed second in the Robot Skills category in the California VEX Robotics Middle School State Championship in San Jose.
Their Robot Skills score is the 10th highest in US (15th in the world) since the VEX Turning Point season began in July of 2018, and qualifies them to attend the VEX World Championships, to be held April 24-27 in Louisville, Ky. Only three percent of all middle school teams qualify for the VEX World Championships. GetVexed credited team Paradigm – composed of eighth graders graders Nidhya Shivakumar and Amrita Pasupathy – and their coach for helping them in their first season.
In addition, GetVexed also won the Amaze Award, which is given to the team with a consistently top-performing robot. Earlier in the season, the team won a Judges Award at the Gael Force Battle of the Bay High School tournament, and placed second at a tournament at Sacred Heart Middle School.
Last weekend, a team composed of Harker eighth graders Nidhya Shivakumar and Amrita Pasupathy, known as Paradigm, allied with team Black Jaguar of Redwood City to win the California VEX Robotics Middle School State Championships in Sunnyvale.
At this state competition, Paradigm won every qualifying match and ranked first in the qualifying rounds. They allied with team Black Jaguar going into the elimination rounds, proving formidable as they cruised through the elimination rounds and won the Tournament Champions Award.
VEX Robotics is the leading and fastest growing robotics program for middle school and high school level students. VEX Robotics competitions are held in cities, states and countries all over the world. In addition to providing a platform to learn engineering and programming, a VEX Robotics project encourages teamwork, leadership and problem solving.
Earlier, on Feb. 17, Paradigm allied with team Inobotics from Palo Alto and won the Google California Signature VEX Robotics championship hosted at the Google campus in Sunnyvale in a field of nearly 75 teams from across the country.
Paradigm will next go on to compete at VEX World Championships, held April 24-26 in Louisville, Ky. The World Championships hosts over 180 middle school teams and 600 high school teams from many states across the country, as well as teams from South America, China, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Approximately 3 percent of middle school teams and 6 percent of high school teams competing at regional events move on to the World Championships.
At last month’s Carrender Robotics/COIL VEX IQ Tournament, held in Fremont, seventh grade robotics enthusiasts Zachary Blue, Adrian Liu, Vivek Nayyar, Kabir Ramzan and Om Tandon received the VEX IQ Challenge’s Excellence Award, the highest honor awarded by the competition. Potential recipients of the award are judged by criteria such as performance in event challenges, robot design and the ability of the team’s robot to drive autonomously. The “Dream Team,” as the students call themselves, have secured a spot at the CREATE U.S. Open Robotics Championship, set to take place in April.
The team also entered the STEM Project competition, winning first place for an app that helps students manage their time while simultaneously informing teachers about how much time is required to finish homework assignments. In developing the project, the students sought insight from professionals at Google, Khan Academy and Stanford University.
On Jan. 19, Harker’s own “Eagle Bots” FIRST Lego League Team – made up of fifth graders Sahil Jain, Farhan Ansari, Mihir Gupta, Daniel Wu and Jaden Chyan – was awarded Most Innovative Solution at the Northern California FLL championship (held at the University of California, Berkeley) for a science project it devised to help astronauts eat better.
The students’ project explored how the quality of food can affect the mood of astronauts in space, who must cope with a lack of fresh produce in addition to constant isolation, leading to issues with physical and emotional health. Upon researching these topics, they found that smell and taste are closely linked, and developed an idea for an “AroMask” that astronauts can wear to immerse themselves in the scents of their favorite foods to stimulate hunger. The team consulted with psychiatrists and NASA scientists as part of its research.
Fifth graders Farhan Ansari, Sahil Jain, Mihir Gupta, Daniel Wu and Jaden Chyan won the Robot Design Award at last month’s First Lego League Northern California Qualifier, held at Lowell High School. The win secured them a spot at the Northern California championship in January in Berkeley.
Prior to the qualifier, the team had been hard at work redesigning their robot, adding two motors, two color sensor and a gyro sensor. “They made clever use of gears to build attachments for performing different tasks on the field and made their programs modular for ease of use,” said Farhan’s mother, Monica Ansari, who coaches the team along with Sonali Jain, Sahil’s mother.
The team also put together a research project that delved into the link between astronauts’ emotional states and the foods they consume while in space, working with health science experts and scientists at NASA.
Monica credited Harker’s science programs with fostering the team’s enthusiasm for robotics. “They projects they have done at school in science and computers have really sparked their interest in robotics and science,” she said, “and it has helped them to tackle the challenges in FLL.”
First Lego League robotics team Alpha Wolves – sixth graders Jordan Labio, Dustin Miao and Kabir Ramzan – had an admirable run at the Razorback World Invitational in Fayetteville, Ark., held May 17-20. The team placed second in the robot alliance competition and overall project, and took a respectable ninth place in robot performance. The Alpha Wolves qualified for the event in January after winning the Silicon Valley Championship. A world-level competition, the Razorback World Invitational featured 58 of the best teams in the country, and 14 from around the globe. More than 35,000 teams competed in this FLL season, which started last summer. Only 500 qualified for world-level events.