Millennium Falcon

We’ve just had the most vexing day — very vexing indeed.

No, I haven’t just woken up from a coma or sustained a  head injury causing me to speak like a 19th century heroine. I have no desire to give you affright, chastise ne’er do wells for being  beef-witted blackguards, drink from a stoup, or give a concert on my pianoforte. But, as is our wont to make you ware of our sundry and varied exploits, I will share our most VEXing experience.

Gerrit, and two teammates, Byron and Ethan, spent the last several weeks at Skyridge High School designing and building a robot. Yes, a robot!  A VEX Robot, which is the name brand of the parts used to construct the robots.

Their weeks of work were in preparation for a tournament this past Saturday, and as often happens with engineering projects, they scrapped the entire thing three days before the tournament and scrambled to rebuild it from scratch.

Since Gerrit’s high school mascot is a falcon, I’ve chosen to name the robot the
“Millennium Falcon”. It looks a lot like an erector set on steroids.

On this VEXing day, more than 70 teenagers (including about 5 girls) spent their Saturday wearing safety goggles while attempting to pilot their robot creations.

Gerrit had no idea protective eyewear was required, so he used my magnifying reading glasses. It was pretty funny to watch him looking over the top of the lenses so he could see to drive the Falcon. I think it really added to his nerdy-chic.

Eric and I wanted to support Gerrit and see what he had been so many spending hours building so we accompanied him to Mountain View High School in Orem. Getting up at 7:15 AM on a Saturday felt rough but, when you love your kid, that’s probably what you do.

Little did I realize, there were teams with kids from Vernal and even Idaho. Their families had to be on the road ridiculously early for the 8 AM start time.

I thought we’d spend an hour or two watching the Millennium Falcon get beaten up by more experienced teams. In actuality, it was close to 8 hours of watching with delight, and sometimes boredom, as 18 robotics teams attempted to get all the yellow jacks and orange cubes across the fence and onto their opponent’s side.

After the initial rounds of competition, we learned the Millennium Falcon was ranked 13th. Gerrit and Byron were pleasantly surprised by their rank (yay, not last!). Skyridge High School is a brand new school. Unlike most of the competitors, who came from and built upon established programs, at least for now, every program at Skyridge this year is a trailblazing one.  

In the second round of competition the 18 teams are required to make alliances with each other narrowing the field to 6 combined teams. This is the part where being 13th, and not really a threat to anyone because of our inexperience, really played to the Millennium Falcon’s favor. Because Gerrit and Byron weren’t ranked high enough to captain an alliance, and since they’d spent their between-match downtime getting to know the top teams from Davis High School, the Falcon was drafted by the top ranked team. Well played, rebel.

Eric and I watched in wonder as Gerrit and his teammate Byron rode the coattails of possibly one of the best high school VEX robotics teams in the country to victory and a guaranteed invite to the State level competition.