The Singapore American School VEX robotics team 6546B had an amazing season! In April, as all robotics events went virtual this year, team 6546B participated by having a local VEX representative witness, videotape, and score our attempts at qualification.

Several weeks later, the team was notified that they had been one of the top qualifiers in Singapore and were invited to the virtual VEX World competition, which was held this past Friday, May 21.

Due to the increased Singapore restrictions on the number of people able to be present for any event, the team moved the entire field to team member Ben Turney's house the Sunday before the event.

Following the current restrictions in place, the team live-streamed the contest from the Turney household. The drivers and programmers were supported on Zoom by the team members who had helped build the machine but were not allowed to be present at the actual event.

This project started in September 2020 and featured the amazing collaboration of the following SAS students: Avery Fiore, Gaurav Goel, Kabir Goklani, Diren Gomez, Liam Kelly, Vinayak Kohli, Emma Li, Alex Liu, Mario Roman, Yohan Sakurai, Buddy Sasidharan, Ananya Shah, Shreya Sridhar, and Ben Turney.

At the actual competition, the team was awarded the highest possible honor— the VEX Worlds Excellence Award. This was partly done by scoring 110 points in the driver segment and 52 points in the autonomous programming portion of the event. This award is given to teams that not only have high driving scores but are also winners or top contenders in the following scored categories: engineering notebook, design, innovate, think, amaze, build, create, judges interview, safety, inspire, energy, and sportsmanship.

This was also a milestone for coaches Meredith White and Bart Millar. They have now coached world championship teams in all three major world robotics competitions: VEX 2021 (online), MATE (Tacoma 2013, Alpena 2014, Newfoundland 2015, and Houston 2016), and FRC (Detroit 2019)

Everyone at SAS robotics thanks parents, donors, and SAS administration for their support in these authentic, world-class robotics competitions!