Akron Public schools sent six teams to the Vex Robotics World Championships in Dallas, Texas, from May 4-8. The event was broken into three parts with the first part, match play, determining placement for the second part, the division elimination round and, finally, the top 10 global tournament finals. Teams must have ranked high in match play to qualify for the division elimination rounds. For the first time in school history, all six teams (three STEM High School and three Firestone CLC) qualified to move on to the division elimination round.
During the division elimination round, all six teams made it through the first wave of playoff matches and moved on to the quarter finals. From there, several teams moved on to the semi-finals, and one team moved on to the division finals. The innovation, coding and collaborative work by all six APS teams was at a top global level. Both schools are looking forward to pushing limits and reaching for the top 10 global tournament finals in the future.
Overall performance puts APS teams in the top 1% of teams globally. With more than 16,000 robots this season around the world, all APS teams finished within the top 160 or better.
Congratulations to Firestone’s purple team for finishing runner-up in their division finals. Both schools look forward to the work that lies ahead the next few years to push the robotics programming to new heights. A big thank-you to coaches Sam Appleby (STEM) and Andrew Wallen (Firestone), College and Career Academies, and the Board of Education for the time, commitment and support they put in to provide these types of opportunities to our learners. We are excited for the new “game” released by VEX for the 2022-23 school year.
Pictured below are the three STEM High School robotics teams and three Firestone robotics teams at the VEX World Championships.
