Grandville High School and Grandville Middle School robotics teams compete each year in the VEX Robotics program. This yea, VEX has released an exciting new game – “Nothing But Net”. The game is great run – and it involves more than 100 foam balls. Forty of these balls must be stacked in four-ball pyramids each time the field is set up for play. This summer the teams found that resetting the VEX field between rounds was very time-consuming.
A RoboDawg freshman and her dad, Elisa LaBarge and Bill LaBarge) came up with an ingenious solution to the field resetting challenge – a custom ball rack. Much like the rack used on a pool table, these plastic triangles make arranging a set of ball much faster. Using a set of ten of these racks to set up the field, RoboDawg teams posted average field reset times under 50 seconds during the end-of-camp tournament. After camp, Elisa worked with a team sponsor (Machine Guard & Cover) to refine the design for the custom ball rack and to arrange for manufacturing of large quantities of these racks.
Teams and tournament hosts can now purchase a set of ten reset racks on the RoboDawgs’ online store. Here’s the link: http://mkt.com/grandville-robodawgs
For more information on the VEX Nothing But Net game, follow this link:http://www.roboticseducation.org/vex-robotics-competitionvrc/current-game/
To learn more about Machine Guard & Cover, visit their website: http://machineguard.com/