Seniors Rakin Shah, Spencer Dugan, Vraj Patel, Adam Carlin and Yonathan Endashaw were awarded the Excellence award at the Illinois V5RC state competition on March 14, qualifying them to go to the VEX World Championship.

The VEX World Championship, in Saint Louis, Mo. on April 21-30, invites over 800 of the top teams from 60 different countries. The team, 321b “BLAST OFF!,” has spent over 40 hours every week since December preparing for the state competition, practicing the game play, improving their code and growing stronger as a team.

“[Rakin] has spent a very large amount of time practicing, getting everything down, making sure that when he needs to be able to do something he can do it right the first time,” Dugan said. “He can’t pay attention to everything while also driving so that’s why I’m watching and I’ll tell him what to do to make sure that he’s getting it done right as fast as possible.”

Getting the Excellence award at state is not an easy accomplishment as judges look at performance during the matches, interviews, strong notes with the robots designs and student conduct.

“We are very proud of ‘Excellence’ because we have a 200 page documentation on the robot, full detail and everything of how we made it with charts and different testing,” Shah said. “The award is about exactly how you got the robot.”

Shah and Dugan have been in robotics for seven years and have improved drastically since they began. ECSB teacher and robotics sponsor, Tim Sullivan, has seen this improvement and the team’s developed strengths.

“With that team in particular, I am almost completely hands off,” Sullivan said. “I’m most impressed with how much they’ve handled their tenacity. Setbacks don’t set them back as much.”

Robotics involves many trials and errors, with each team trying to get the perfect robot. Taking inspiration from TenTon, a robotics powerhouse, the team is currently on their sixth robot to prepare for the world championship.

“A big part of robotics is having a code, it’s called an autonomous code for the robot, where it does things on its own,” Dugan said. “That’s one of the biggest things you have to spend a lot of time on, because if it messes up one time it could mess up your whole competition. Every team is going to have their code perfected, so if we don’t, we’re basically guaranteed to not get anywhere.”

Until the championship, the team plans to scrimmage against North and other West teams as often as possible.