Dallas Convention Center Arena
650 S. Griffin St.
Dallas, Texas 75202

As the Atlanta trip came to an end for most of the team members, four students and two mentors began the second part of their trip – their trip to Dallas, Texas to attend the World Championship for VEX. In the whole history of team 359, this was the only trip that had the least amount of people on the trip. Only one van was needed for transportation instead of two to four vans for the previous trips. Getting around Dallas, Texas was faster and better because there was only one van.

It is the first day of the VEX World Championship and hundreds of teams have gathered at the front entrance of the Dallas Convention Center. Teams from all over the world, such as New Zealand, China, Mexico, and Brazil participated in the event. The first day of the event, the team unpacked the robot and got it ready for inspection. It was a good thing we had the robot inspected early because if we had waited five minutes, we would have been the 50th team to get inspected. Since the first day of the competition was to practice and set things up, the drive team practiced as much as possible after the robot was inspected to prepare for the competition.  There were quite a few schools representing Hawaii.  The schools were McKinley High School, Iolani High School, Campbell High School, Nanakuli High School, Farrington High School, and Highlands Intermediate School. Only our school and Highlands Intermediate were in the same division, the Technology Division. There were about a hundred teams in each division and there were four divisions in the whole event. The four divisions were, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).

For the second day of the event, the qualification matches began. In our division we only had 6 matches, but we did very well.  We were undefeated and ranked 3rd.  Up to this point there were no problems with our robot.  We had a couple of tough matches, going against some of the powerhouse teams in VEX  - Team 254, the Cheesy Poofs, and the teams from China whose robots had the same  design as the Cheesy Poofs.

 

It is the last day of the championships and we finished the rest of our qualification matches. At the end of the qualification matches, we were ranked 3rd while Team 394 (Highlands Intermediate) was ranked 1st followed by Team 8125 (one of the Chinese teams).  Right after the qualification matches, the alliance selection was held.  Team 8125, chose us in the first round of selection and then chose team 211A to be our 3rd alliance partner.  During the playoffs, our robot started to malfunction and almost jeopardized our chance of winning. Fortunately our alliance was good enough to beat some of the powerhouse teams during the playoffs and led us to the division finals in the main arena. When we made it to the division finals, we found out that there were four Hawaii schools that made it to their division finals.  The schools were McKinley High School, Campbell High School, and Highlands Intermediate. In our division finals we went against the 1st seed alliance which was led by Highlands Intermediate. It was a great match, but we got the victory and won our division. After winning our division, our alliance went to the semifinals for the world championships and challenged the team that won the Science Division.  Unfortunately the winning alliance from the Science Division defeated us during the 3rd match of the semifinals. We walked away from the event with another banner and a trophy for winning our division and the knowledge about the next season’s VEX challenge.