By Cynthia Wang

SEPTEMBER 22 – From 6 AM to 10 PM last Saturday, robotics teams from SAS Pudong, SAS Puxi, and BISS Puxi attended SAS Puxi’s 16 Hour Build event. Puxi advertises the event as “an opportunity for students interested in robotics to be guided through robot-building and tournament structure.” Within 16 hours, students from the three schools are mixed into random teams, then guided in building a robot that will be able to accomplish a certain number of tasks, after which a mini tournament would take place.

President of the Pudong FTC team Michael Lin said Puxi “spent a lot more time designing the game” this year as opposed to the year before, citing a picture of the game objectives and scoring elements, as shown below.

Junior Ian Huang joined robotics this year and, after participating in the 16 Hour Build, gave us some of his reflections on the event. He said that the Build “gave [him] a lot of insight [in]to the nature of robotics.” He recognized that robotics “is not only just about building and programming, it is a team effort where communication and collaboration are essential in achieving your team’s goal.”

In particular, Ian commented on the team scrambling, stating that it was “what made the experience worth it.” According to Ian, team scrambling placed participants “with four of five other strangers and in the next 16 hours, [they] would have to work as a team to build, measure, program, and test the robot in order for it to be able to compete.”

Michael Lin also spoke of a highlight of the competition: a bet involving a lunch date.

“If a team [filled the letter A on the game field] with scoring elements, they get a lunch date with a Puxi exec,” Michael said. The teams “in the finals…[ended up] collaborating to fill the A,” Michael continued, winning them a lunch date with Puxi robotics president Sammy Levin.

Although the bet took away from the competitive element of the tournament, Michael said that “it ended the event [in] a good spirit,” elaborating that “collaboration at the 16 Hour Build was more valuable than winning,” as the event allowed “for students from different schools to get to know each other better.”