Humberto Rodriguez, left to right, Jose Rodriguez, Peter Almazon, Coach Justin Fraser, Bella Lopez, Coach Jeff Cooper, Ismael Hernandez. Courtesy photos.
SANTA MARIA — The Delta High School Robotics Team recently captured the “Judges Award” during their first Vex EDR tournament.
The honor recognized the Delta Dragon’s design, engineering notebook and team interview. The competition involved 32 teams from comprehensive high schools and was held at Centennial High School in Bakersfield.
“When the programming was corrupted during the tournament during an upload, I had to write a new code for moving the wheels, the lift, and the claw in less than an hour,’’ said student Ismael Hernandez. “Rather than quit, I decided to try. Thankfully, it worked.’’
Coaches Jeff Cooper and Justin Fraser recognized a few years ago that students coming into Delta needed more opportunities to learn science and technology so they began planning a program using Fraser’s video game design class as a springboard for interested students.
Robotics team members have to spend many hours outside of school building and programming their robots to perform tasks on a field against other robots from many high schools. The Vex EDR competitions serve 20,000 schools world-wide.
“The team started really building and coding just over a month ago,’’ Copper said. “They had many struggles, kept making improvements in the design, rebuilt the code multiple times and at the competition did more than just play. They are learning how to be engineers.”
Ismael Hernandez, left to right, Peter Almazon, Bella Lopez, Jose Rodriguez, Humberto Rodriguez.