LAS VEGAS (KLAS)— Students on the Falcon Force Robotics team at Coral Academy of Science are preparing for their next competition in Dallas, Texas.
The first-year team already has a number of awards, which helped qualify them to compete in the Vex IQ world championships in May, where they’ll be facing off over 700 teams from across the world.
“We’re really excited,” said Tea Suriyathep, Falcon Force Robotics student. “We just started a few months ago so we’re kind of like babies compared to the other teams so this was really unexpected.”
This season’s challenge is focused on building a robot, which the students have named ‘Soaring Falcon’ to shoot balls in a basket for certain points and hanging the robot off a low bar or having the robot crawl up,
“One of our hardest challenges has been getting our robot to not encounter any errors throughout all the competitions. When we made our robot, we decided to start from scratch, with no instructions at all. We used our own basic ideas throughout our design process and from there we developed a robot that could efficiently accomplish our tasks,” said Falcon Force Robotics team student Cason Noll. “We did encounter some minor struggles, but we pushed through.”
Falcon Force Robotics coach Adam Harper said he’s really proud of all the involvement from his students.
“For our kids to get this experience at a middle school age, it really is going to open their eyes to what kind of opportunities are out there and hopefully it’ll get them excited and drive them to challenge themselves more,” said Harper. “We have a mixture of kids that can do different things whether it’s coding writing or building. It’s just exciting because of what they’ve been able to shine or show, we get that opportunity to face those 799 teams from around the world.”
If you would like to help the Falcon Force Robotics team get to Vex IQ Worlds, they have a GoFundMe link here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Help-Students-on-their-journey-to-VEX-Worlds?qid=baf256c3b8ba4de254caeedfd463e0e9