VEX Robotics State Championship brings student STEM talent to Clarksville | VIDEO

CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – The Tennessee VEX Robotics State Championship was held at the Austin Peay State University Dunn Center on Friday and Saturday. Hosted by the Volunteer State Robotics Foundation, the event brought middle and high school teams from across Tennessee to Clarksville for local competitions and a chance to advance to the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas, Texas, this May.

In addition to the main tournament, students participated in skills competitions, where robots performed autonomously after being programmed to do certain tasks to score points. “This is a competition where the robot is following pre-programmed routes and using the code developed by these teams to score as many points as possible without driver control,” said Ted Price, treasurer of the Volunteer State Robotics Foundation.

Video by Wesley Irvin

Teams also competed for awards in innovation, problem-solving and design. “The judged awards cover a wide variety of topics, from innovative building techniques to creative problem-solving approaches to robust design schematics,” said Price. “Our teams will do interviews and present their robots to panels of judges, who will then deliberate, and by the end of the competition they will give out several additional trophies to those other teams.”

The event showed the the growing opportunities for students interested in engineering and programming. “We do a really good job as a community of supporting our athletes and our kids who are into the arts and give them plenty of opportunity,” said KaBao McCarver, president of the Volunteer State Robotics Foundation. “But in our community, I find that our students who are really into STEM and who are STEM-minded have a harder time finding those opportunities, and so this is just a great way for them to shine.”

The top 10 teams from the Tennessee State Championship will qualify for the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas in May.

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