TRIAD — The Rubik Racers are rrrrrready to rrrrrrumble!
The Racers, an all-girls elementary-school robotics team from Westchester Country Day School, leave today for Dallas, Texas, where they’ll compete this week in the annual VEX IQ Robotics World Championship, the largest robotics competition in the world.
The three-girl team — consisting of fifth-graders Emma Reese Ballance, Anna Kate Albert and Johanna English, all age 11 — qualified for the competition by winning the state robotics competition for their age group in February.
“It’s unusual to have an all-girls team, because generally this is a boys’ kind of thing, but these three girls have been awesome all year long,” said the team’s coach, Terry Andrews, director of technology at Westchester Country Day. “They’re one of only four elementary schools in North Carolina to be invited to the world championships.”
The Rubik Racers are one of some 420 elementary-school teams from around the world that will compete this week. The competition will take place Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and the girls are pumped.
“I’m a little nervous, but I’m also very excited about it,” Anna Kate said. “I love robotics.”
In fact, all three girls love robotics.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” Emma Reese said. “We have designed, built and programmed our robot to do all these different things, and we’re able to drive it around.”
At the competition, all eyes will be on Ruby — the girls’ finely tuned robot — as she performs a series of tasks required for the competition. In addition to driving the course autonomously — something the girls have coded her to accomplish — Ruby will be required to pick up and move blocks of different sizes, and to shoot them into goals located at the four corners of the driving course.
The girls have only 60 seconds to complete as many tasks as possible, and the team will receive an assigned number of points for each task Ruby accomplishes.
“I think we can hold our own,” Emma Reese said. “Some teams are scoring over 100, and our high score so far is 87, but we’ll still do our best. And whatever happens, we’re still the best in our state.”
Andrews said the international competition will be a great social experience for the girls.
“It’s really exciting for the kids to be able to go down there and be a part of the world environment,” he said. “There are teams there from countries all over the world. It’s just a very good experience socially for them to be able to walk around and mingle with all these kids from other countries.”
