Robotics Team Maneuvers to Regionals

At the 2021 Dallas BEST Robotics Tournament, the St. Mark’s Robotics Team placed third overall and took home the “Founders’ Award for Creative Design”— the award for the best-designed robot in the eyes of the judges. The North Texas BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) competition called for the team to build a robot in eight weeks that could perform a variety of remotely controlled and autonomous tasks.

“We were in the Makerspace every night until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., and you can’t do that without developing a kind of team dynamic,” said team co-captain Tomek Marczewski ’22. “I think that's what I enjoyed the most about it – laughing about the mistakes we made, eating industrial numbers of Oreos, and reveling in the fact that our robot finally drove straight. It really is the little things.”

The theme of this year’s BEST Tournament was ‘robotic demolition,’ requiring the robot to tear apart structures and recycle, reuse, or discard the materials. As part of the all-around competition, teams were also evaluated on their engineering process, scientific writing, interviews, marketing presentation, and display booth.

A hefty congratulations to our mechanically-inclined lions: James Singhal ’22 (co-captain), Tomek Marczewski ’22 (co-captain), Isaac Song ’22, Ian Lin ’22, Ben Gravel ’22, Renil Gupta ’23, Alex Wang ’23, James Thomson ’23, Will Spencer ’23, Thomas Goglia ’23, Vivek Patel ’24, Arav Rawat ’24, and Will Clarke ’24. The team is sponsored by Doug Rummel, Founders' Master Teaching Chair; Stewart Mayer, Makerspace Director; and Fletcher Carron, Stephen M. Seay ’68 Science Department Chair.

 

By virtue of being the highest finishing non-UIL school in the all-around competition, the team advances to the December regional competition in Frisco, known as Texas BEST, where they will compete against 70 qualifying schools from Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Louisiana.