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Pinelands recently welcomed its reigning robotics world-champion team Texpand who triumphed over their competitors with one of the smallest budgets at the George R Brown Convention Centre in Houston, Texas in the United States of America (USA) last month (April).
Texpand was one of 220 teams of more than 9 000 from around the world that made it through the rigorous qualifying stages to compete at the global stage for this year’s First Tech Challenge (FTC) championship.
The global showpiece attracted an estimated 90 000 people over four days, with learners competing in various robotics disciplines.
“The FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) championship is a massive global event,” Texpand’s co-coach Michelle Buckle pointed out.
“The FTC had competing teams hail from more than 40 countries, with a few fellow African teams, from Libya, Morocco and Nigeria.”
She said the game format of the competition required two teams from different countries to form an alliance to compete on the field against two others.
“It is not on a country-versus-country basis, and so teams learn to communicate, cooperate with and compete against teams from all over the world, crossing cultural and language barriers in the process.”
Buckle said it felt truly surreal yet wonderful to be hailed world champions. “We feel a lot of relief too because our alliance partners took a risk selecting us, and we were nervous about letting them down. I’m sure they are happy about their selection now!”
For Texpand members, many dreams were fulfilled over those four days.
“The team played against Ro2D2, a world-class team from Romania whose robot and game this season was truly inspiring, and beat them,” Buckle beamed. “Then, getting back to our pit area with the film crew from Behind the Bot waiting to do an interview with our team and review their robot.”
Texpand was ecstatic when they made it into the elimination matches on an alliance with two fantastic teams, AiCitizens (Romania) and The Clueless (San Diego), which were famous in the FTC community even before the event started. “The team had looked up to these teams for a long time, so getting to work with them was a dream come true.”
Texpand received compliments on their software from the most revered programmer in the FTC community and won the first place Control Award. This goes to the team that demonstrates innovative thinking to solve game challenges, such as autonomous operation, improving mechanical systems with intelligent control, or using sensors to achieve better results.
They also had two team members as Deans List Finalists, which made them part of 200 of the top FTC learners in the world.
“So, we came home with three enormous trophies!”
But, she added, the team also came home with a message of hope for South Africa “that it doesn’t take huge amounts of money and resources to be a world champion.
“Our team had one of the lowest budgets at the championships. It doesn’t require you to have access to technical coaches to learn world-class skills because of the incredible resources available online to teach yourself and online communities that are eager to help.”
Texpand values and embraces multi-dimensional diversity in the team, like racial diversity; neurodiversity; geographic in terms of urban players (from Pinelands, Mitchells Plain, Claremont and Simonstown) as well as rural (members from Grabouw and Robertson); age diversity: 12-17; gender diversity and socio-economic diversity.
“The volunteer coaches are not skilled in robotics, but help members make connections to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals and other more experienced robotics teams to access the help and learning resources they need to achieve their goals.”
Coaching with her husband Greg, the Texpand team consists of 13 members: Ethan Buckle (started the team in 2020), Joshua Anderson, Benjamin Anderson (both from farms in Robertson), Peter Robinson (Simonstown), Matthew Greenwood (Kenilworth), Hannah Buckle (Pinelands), Isa Adams (Mitchells Plain), Nikela Cele (Grabrouw), Samuel Buckle (Pinelands), Ray Lawrence (Pinelands), Joshua Myburgh (Plattekloof Glen), James Scheppening (Pinelands) and Iris Adlard (Pinelands).
She said this victory would not have been possible without locals and corporate sponsors that contributed toward Texpand’s diverse team of members, some of whom do not have the means to finance such an adventure. “We had one very big donation from a corporate sponsor, which had read our article. Other organisations we had previously partnered with pulled through and we are so very grateful to each of them.
“We also feel we have additional responsibility to carry on and encourage growth in robotics education in SA. Winning such a huge tournament is like a gift that gives us opportunities to boost and encourage people in our country to have hope, dream and work to do well on the world stage.”
