The sound of frantic voices and conversations fill the cramped space as dozens of teams bustle around their robots, making split-second decisions and fixes. Teams have chosen their alliances and continue to prepare for the final stages of the robotics tournament.

The annual VEX Robotics Competition is open to students in grades three through 12. Although the upper school has no official VEX robotics team, many students still participate.

Sophomores Aria Coalson, Maya Kumar, Anooshree Sengupta, Jessica Susai and Akshaya Vemuri compete in VEX. They typically spend eight hours each weekend working on their robot and preparing for tournaments.

“At the beginning it was kind of tough because I’d never done it before, but when you have a team that works so well together, it’s not as intense,” Akshaya, who joined the team this year, said.

The team has attended five tournaments this year, including the state competition on March 5. They have received multiple design awards and were tournament finalists this year. As freshmen, they won two tournaments, earned excellence awards, became semifinalists at the state level tournament and competed at the international level in 2014 and 2015, where they won a design award.

Another popular robotics competition is the First Robotics Competition (FRC). Akshaya was a member of FRC Team 1868, “The Space Cookies,” in her freshman year.

“VEX is a lot smaller because our team only has five people versus the large FRC team, so everyone really plays a crucial role and has individual tasks to do every time,” she said.

Freshmen Andrew Chang, Chris Gong, Kaushik Shivakumar, Rithvik Panchapakesan and Eric Wang have been participating in VEX for four years. They have won awards for excellence, design, innovation and programming skills and have been named tournament champions several times in the middle school and high school divisions.

“[My favorite part is] being able to design a bunch of different stuff and being able to actually works hands on with parts in programming and seeing what we actually create [and] what it does,” Chris said.

Sophomore Mona Lee participates in VRC in a one-person team. She began building her robot in July and typically spends seven to eight hours a week working before a tournament.

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Different types of robots develop throughout the year as people find more effective ways of doing things. There’s a very significant learning curve.

— Mona Lee (10)

“You need to keep up with the competition and stay ahead of it, and that’s really difficult to manage, especially since I’m a pretty small team, we don’t have time to try out each design that comes along,” Mona said. “There are different types of robots that develop throughout the year and people find more effective ways of doing things, so then the scores go higher, the competition gets a lot more competitive. There’s a very significant learning curve.”

This year, she has won awards for excellence and programming skills and has been named a finalist, semifinalist and champion at three different tournaments. Mona is now eligible to attend the the World Tournament.

“I love the tournaments and how much strategy goes into all the decisions,” Mona said. “You can see that people are very dedicated, and it’s really interesting to see what they bring to the tournament. It’s a very nice experience to talk to and socialize with teams from all over the world, since we’re all passionate about the same thing.”

Andrew has had several similar experiences at tournaments.

“We make a lot of new friends from other schools and we get to experience a lot and meet a lot of really, really smart people,” he said.

Each year’s game challenge is released each April at the VEX Worlds tournament, and teams work on designing, building and programming their robot throughout the year, typically in preparation for multiple tournaments.

This year’s challenge, “Nothing but Net,” involves alliances of two teams each trying to throw balls into a low goal, worth one point, or a high goal, worth five points. Alliances can win up to 50 additional points at the end of a match for lifting their partner robot. Each match consists of a 15 second autonomous period and one minute and 45 seconds in which the driver controls their robot.

Mona’s and Andrew’s teams will both attend VEX worlds, which will take place from April 20 to 23 in Louisville, Kentucky.

In the original version of this published piece in The Winged Post, Kaushik Shivakumar was incorrectly misidentified in two photographs and in the team roster. The piece was corrected for publication online on April 3, 2016.