East SF Bay Area Middle School Students To Compete At California State Robotics Championship

DUBLIN, Calif. - March 10, 2014 - PRLog -- The Quarry Lane School’s Middle School Robotics Teams have been invited to compete against top state teams at the 2^nd Annual California State Robotics Championship this month. The competition is by invitation-only and in order to qualify teams must meet specific qualification criteria based on their team and robot performance at California State events in the 2013-2014 VEX IQ Competition season.

Quarry Lane’s 5^th grade Robotics Team, including students Adeeb Abassi, Connor Ortiz, Huda Saadat and Jack Gupta, qualified for the State Championship by winning the recent VEX Tournament in San Jose and the competition’s Design Trophy for “Best Robot.” Winning one of the two would have qualified the team.

Before building their robot, the 8th grade Team, including Ayo Oluyemi, Jack Setchell, Kiran Amuthan, Manak Ahluwalia and Matthieu Lu, spent countless hours testing designs using engineering software at the school’s state-of-the-art middle school Robotics Lab. As a result, their prototypes were tested and rebuilt exhaustively until they reached a robot small enough to fit under short obstacles but which can grow tall and reach heights of up to four feet. The flexibility is key given qualifying championships include many different challenges and matches that can last up to 12 hours.

Quarry Lane’s Chair of the Applied Sciences and Engineering track, Mike Chow, who also coaches the Middle School Robotics Teams, said “I’m impressed with the level of maturity of our Quarry Lane Robotics students. From the design stages to testing the robots, they focused on solving the many problems along the way without getting frustrated. They were also remarkably calm under pressure and have been incredibly supportive of each other, a crucial life skill they will carry with them to the rest of their academic and professional lives.”

Quarry Lane School’s Robotics Program is an important component of the school’s innovative Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) track. “I've been amazed to see the level of ingenuity in the applied science projects, particularly within the Robotics Teams’,” said Quarry Lane’s Founder and Headmaster, Dr. Sabri Arac, who has a background in metallurgic engineering and developed the SET track. “I'm confident Quarry Lane’s SET track is preparing the innovative engineers of tomorrow.”