Interview with the Vex Team

As members of the PR team at iRaiders, we recently had the honor of speaking with our three middle school Vex robotics teams and their mentor, Avi Nagar. 

They had a great season that recently ended. The Melrose middle school has three Vex teams that often work together. One of the teams made it to the quarter-finals while the other two made it all the way to the semi-finals. We were there to see many of the focused team members continuing to test and admire the robots they worked so hard to build. One member of the team, Ronan, talked to us about how they had started the season with a simple push-cart robot that could only shove the field pieces around, but by the end of the season they were able to stack at least 7 blocks on top of eachother.

Ronan said to us that he felt the best part of Vex was, “Building the bot, developing it through trial and error; improving it.”

We talked to another member of the team, Ingrid, who readily introduced us to every member of the three teams, and at that, told us a few things about each person. There was a real sense of community and spirit from the team despite the fact that their work space has shifted drastically over the past couple of years. From middle school classrooms, to their current space in one of Melrose’s local businesses, they have continued to solve their way through each challenge presented by the competitions.

Ingrid noted that her favorite part of being on the team was, “The people, the challenges, the quirky moments, and the friends we made along the way.”

We look forward to seeing some of the members step up into the Melrose highschool FRC team soon. If the success of the Vex teams continues well at the pace it has, then there will be some great robots in the coming high school years.