Vale robotics team advances to world robotics championship | Malheur Enterprise

Vale robotics students pose with their inventions for the Oregon VEX Robotics Competition State Championship. (Photo by Jim Schaffeld)

SALEM – A Vale High School robotics team will head to Iowa and Kentucky next month to compete at the VEX Robotics World Championship Tournament.

The Viking team of Japheth Carlson and Jacob Graviet qualified for the world competition at the state tournament last weekend in Salem.

At the state competition, teams from schools across the state had to design and build a robot from scratch. Each team also competed in different types of tasks, testing their skills in robot construction, technical skills and teamwork abilities.

Carlson and Graviet finished with the second highest score in the skills challenge, with their robot performing remote-controlled and autonomous routines they programmed themselves.

“That usually involves writing 500 to 600 lines of code, but these kids managed to minimize it to just a couple hundred lines using subroutine programs,” said Jim Schaffeld, Vale High robotics instructor.

Last year, one of Schaffeld’s teams competed at the world championship in Kentucky, and finished 73rd out of 95 teams.

Carlson and Graviet will go to the national competition in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the first weekend in April before heading off to the world championships in Louisville, Kentucky, at the end of April. 

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