VIDEO: 5th Annual Vex Robotics Competition

NEW HOPE, Miss.(WCBI) – If you rode by New Hope high school today, you may have seen a lot of heavy metal.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a robot take over it was just the fifth VEX Robotics competition.

Students from all over the state gathered at New Hope high school to compete in the “Game of Zones.”

“We’re having a vex robotics competition,” said organizer Kelley Soule. “We’re hosting high school and middle school teams from around the state. The tournament champions and excellence award winners will then quality to move on to the state championship that will be in March then if they wind the state championship they get to go to Louisville Kentucky to compete for the world competition.”

Soule is the schools robotics teacher. She says this competition is not only fun but will benefit students looking to enter the engineering field.

“The robots are 100% built by the students from the ground up they start with their chassy and drive train and move from there. They learn to use censors and any programming any kind of stem thing you can think of that’s what they are learning,” said Soule.

There were 21 teams of four in Saturday’s competition.

New Hope Sophomore Caine Stanford says he knew he wanted to be on the robotics team, way before getting to Saturday’s competition.

“As a kid I like to build things. Whenever I was able and offered to be in Robotics, I kind of took it and was like I’ll see what it’s about . In stem class I was like yeah this is something that I really want to do so I got in here and took it from there,” said Caine.

Logan Yarborough says they spent months preparing for the competition. He says the ultimate goal is to get to the next phase of competition.

“When you quality for it you get to go there and you get to compete against everybody in the state. If you go to state and you quality for Worlds you get to go and compete against everybody,” said Yarborough.

Emily Monahan is parent to a New Hope Middle School student. She says she started him on robotics early because she knew he would benefit down the road.

“My student did not know anything about robotics pryor to starting in the sixth grade and he has learned so much about building about programming and problem solving and team work negotiating those kinds of things. So he’s really vested in the program and it’s really been neat to see how far he is stretching himself,” said Monahan.