By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
LINCROFT – A robotics team from High Technology High School (HTHS) recently defeated some of the best teams in New Jersey to qualify for a state tournament in March.
Team 765A, nicknamed Team Fury Tech Alpha, secured the victory and earned the tournament champion title at the Tipping Point Rumble at Millburn Jan. 15.
All three HTHS teams qualified for the semifinals but only 765A made it to the final round, explained Christopher Hanas, an HTHS engineering, computer science and software engineering teacher and adviser for the Robotics & Coding Club.
The meet was part of the VEX Robotics Competition, presented by the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation which promotes an interest in STEM through hands-on robotics engineering programs. Each year VEX Robotics, the company that designs and distributes the components that are used to build the robots, releases a new “game.” This year’s game is “Tipping Point” which asks teams to pair up with another team to compete in various challenges on a 12-by-12-foot playing surface. Teams must build and program their robot, then drive it through a series of tasks which this year include placing rings, moving objects and returning the robot to an elevated platform at the end of the match.
There are more than 11,500 teams from 40 countries playing Tipping Point in 750 tournaments with the hopes of making it to the World Championships.
Team 765A allied with a team from Cherry Hill East through the elimination rounds and eventually defeated two Millburn teams – considered the best in the country – to take the title, automatically qualifying them for the New Jersey state event in March.
According to Hanas, HTHS began competing in the VEX Robotics Competition during the 2015-16 season. The school added a second team in 2016 and a third team in 2020. Hanas has been advising the club and coaching the teams since 2016. Commvault, a data management company with corporate headquarters in Tinton Falls, was “instrumental in helping the HTHS VEX teams get started and has continued to act as a team sponsor,” said Hanas.
Through the years the teams have won numerous awards at competitions; Team 765A, which consists of stu- dents Katherine Fang, Aliya Grinberg, Harold Huang, Brad Miller, Esben Nielson, Ayden O’Keefe, Nikhil Osuri, Adiitya Sar waikar and Sid Srivastava, has qualified for the World Tournament three times.
Hanas said his goal in coaching and advising is to “provide an opportunity for as many students to participate on the competitive teams as possible.
“I’ve always had a strong passion for STEM,” he said, even though these types of oppor tunities weren’t available to him growing up.
“I would have loved to compete in robotics myself,” he said. “However, competitive leagues such as VEX were not widely available when I was in high school.”
The competition season doesn’t begin until the school year starts, but Hanas said the students are so committed they “will meet in a virtual setting over the summer to discuss prototype designs.”
Throughout an event the teams adjust whenever possible. Brad Miller, the driver for Team 765A explained: “Each team took a different approach to the game, so we had to adapt our strategy for every new opponent.”
That doesn’t stop once the tournament is over.
Due to COVID-19, attendance at the Millburn event was limited to five students per team, team advisors and official chaperones. The competition was live-streamed to allow parents to watch the event. That meant other teams not in attendance could watch as well, gaining important knowledge for the upcoming competitions.
The HTHS students will now hold “rigorous design reviews, looking at what needs to be improved for the next competition,” Hanas said.
“Depending on their performance, each team will decide how extensively they need to modify their design. This could take the form of minor assembly or code alterations to a complete rebuild. This means that no team has the luxury of remaining stagnant and must evolve throughout the season to remain competitive,” he said.
There are two more competitions before the state championship which means the other HTHS teams still have a chance to qualify. It also means teams have opportunities to “optimize their driving, programming, build quality and pit-crew operations,” according to Hanas, who thinks a strong drive team is a very important factor for success.
“Having a feel for how the robot will respond and being able to react accordingly is important during the 2 vs. 2 matches because many of those will not be decided until the final seconds,” he explained.
In addition to the student participants, Hanas said HTHS benefits from an “equally passionate and supportive parent group” which fundraises to purchase not only robot components and game elements, but also to pay event registration fees.
Hanas said he is “extremely impressed” with the passion and commitment his students show to the robotics program.
“They continuously demonstrate an exemplary level of maturity, responsibility, talent and sportsmanship and as such are outstanding representatives of the HTHS student body,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the Jan. 17 to Feb. 2, 2022, print edition of The Two River Times.
