Iron Chargers receive invite to US Create Open

The Grygla Iron Chargers attended the MN State VEX Robotics Tournament in St. Cloud, MN, last weekend. Even though they didn’t qualify for the World Championship, they did qualify for the US Create Open in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which consists of 200 high school teams. They attended this competition last year and are looking forward to it again this spring on April 2-4, 2018.

This year, the two teams are Team 4149C: Trystan Jelle, Abby Kiesow, Jake Ahlbeck and Elise Monson, and Team 4149G: Olivia Tykward, Julianne Nordby and Bailey Watne.

Updates were provided on the Iron Charger’s Facebook page, which followed their weekend at the River’s Edge Convention Center in St. Cloud. It was fun for parents, friends and fans to follow along with the team’s matches. The updates of each day, posted by the team, are being provided below for your reading pleasure.

Friday night, February 2nd:

The Iron Chargers are in St. Cloud getting ready for the VEX Robotics State Competition. We will have some qualifying matches this evening starting at approximately 6:30pm and lots more tomorrow! 

Abby (Kiesow) has been working away to perfect her 1 minute autonomous routine for the C team. The robot is doing all of the driving through a pre-programmed code using a whole slew of sensors including; potentiometers, quadrature encoders, line followers, and ultrasonic range finders. This is, by far, the highest level of programming the team has achieved.

(We have taken over a hotel conference room along with the NCTC college team.)

The C team had two matches and went 1-1.The G team had one match and is 0-1. As usual, we had some technical glitches. The team stayed up last night and seems to have gotten it worked out! The C team is also ranked 2nd so far in the skills challenge.

Saturday, February 3rd:

The G-team won their first match of the morning and are now 1-1. The C team won their first match of the day and is now 2-1.

Later in the day, the C team finished qualifications at 5-2 and were ranked 11th out of 64. The G team finished 3-4 and were ranked 43rd.

Not sure how alliance selection is going to play out!

Both teams are a part of the 6th place alliance along with Warren/Alvarado/Oslo.

Only 24 teams get to this point, so we have done great, but we definitely have an uphill battle ahead. We go against the 3rd ranked alliance soon!

We lost the first quarter-finals round 65-63. Ouch.

Lost the second match 89-84. We are eliminated from the competition, but the team did great! Congrats to all the other teams. The level of play in the state is amazing!

Iron Chargers Team 4149G won the CREATE award in St. Cloud.