April 29, 2013
04/30/13 From April 16th-20th Plymouth High School students Josh Kuhn and Kennedy Schneiders were in Anaheim, CA competing in the Vex Robotics World Championships. The boys arrived at the Anaheim Convention Center on Tuesday and got set up over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday and qualifying began Thursday and continued on through the early part of Saturday.
The field of competitors consisted of over 700 teams featuring 15,000 kids from 28 different countries. This may seem like a lot, and it is, but out of all of the competitive robotics teams in the world less than 10% actually make it to the world competition which makes the fact that they made it that far an awesome feat in itself!
There were five high school divisions featuring 210 total qualifying matches and the boys team, Team 5003 – The Robo Ninjas ran up a 7-3 record during qualifying. Very impressive considering no team went undefeated and given the fact that, at one point, the boys were ranked 2nd based on point scoring!
When the qualifying rounds ended the boys were ranked 18th and took that into the finals after being selected during the Alliance portion of the tournament by the #4 ranked team. However, sadly, The Robo Ninjas were knocked out by a mere 4 point difference during the finals and finished the day, and the tournament, ranked 18th in the world.
The champions of their division went on to win the world competition, beating the other 4 divisions in an overall finals match, and consisted of a combination of a team from Massachusetts and of a team from New Zealand.
Great job Josh and Kennedy!