St. Mary’s hosted 28 teams such as International School of the Sacred Heart, DOHSCHOOL, Showa Elementary School from across Japan this past Saturday on Febuary 15th, including Tokyo and Aichi teams, to the VEX IQ National Championship. Two big events were conducted: the Teamwork Challenge, which saw teams competing together to acheive the highest achievable scores, and the Skills Challenge, which created for individual performance. St. Mary’s teams reached as far as 8th in Teamwork Challenge and 13th in Skills Challenge. Also, team “74847E – St. Mary’s” won the Think Award, an award for outstanding programming and strategic planning by the team.
Even with the hard work and dedication of being a host, St. Mary‘s continues to support the competition as part of its global STEM education efforts. Organizing an event of this size requires careful management of facilities, volunteers, and schedules, but the school considers it a oppourtunity of providing students with hands-on experience while becoming a leader in robotics education. The tournament is also a way of hosting an opportunity for inviting other foreign schools to participate, which increases the number of Japanese robotics individuals further.
It was a amazing year for the robotics program at St. Mary‘s, where students transitioned to working with advanced robotics peices, working on their accuracy and game strategy. Even though the teams improved significantly, they know they must practice more to reach higher levels of coding. In the coming years, St. Mary‘s will seek to increase training and continue its competitive plan so that it may be even more successful in the future.
With nearly 250 attendees, including student competitors, family members, and volunteers, the tournament was a great success. The school is already preparing for next year‘s competition, with hopes of continuing to improve team performance and event organization. With new students joining and veteran members expanding, St. Mary‘s is dedicated to growing its robotics program and creating future innovators. For further information about the final results visit this link. https://www.robotevents.com/robot-competitions/vex-iq-competition/RE-VIQRC-24-6344.html#results-