Acacia Chrisjohn didn’t really need another interest to pursue at Hesston High School. She was an artist, played in concert and jazz bands, and was active with her youth group at Koerner Heights Church in Newton, Kansas. The school’s robotics team wasn’t even on her radar, but some friends encouraged her to try it in her sophomore year. By her senior year, she and two teammates won the Kansas state championship and went on to compete at the VEX Robotics 2024 World Championship last spring.
What are the basics of a robotics team?
VEX Robotics develops a game every year. High school teams design, build and code a robot to play the game. Last year’s game had scoring objects the robots had to get into low netted goals on either end of the field and obstacles for the robots to navigate. Four teams are in the arena during each game, randomly assigned into two alliances who compete two on two against each other. You’re often teamed with others you’ve never played with before so there’s a lot of communication and strategizing with people you don’t know.
What does it take to create this robot?
It’s a lot of strategizing, designing and trial and error. One of our team members did most of the actual building and coding. My role was notebooking with daily entries, reviews of every single competition, the strategies we saw in other teams and explaining our thought process on why we chose specific mechanisms. My team completely re-built our robot four times before we got to the state championship.
How does the notebook help in your competition?
Besides getting us points for the overall state championship, we also submitted the notebook for the Innovate Award. Based on our notebook explanation of why we built our robot’s climbing mechanism and why we thought it would be effective in our game-playing, we won that award, too.
What was it like to compete at the World Championship in Dallas, Texas?
It was very interesting to see how the game strategy had developed differently in other parts of the world. They had completely different robot builds. One of the partners we were teamed up with for a competition was from India and didn’t speak English. It was a real test of our patience and communication abilities, but definitely in a good way.
Are there ways you have found your faith affected by this competition?
I really enjoyed the way Hesston’s team members got together to pray at the beginning of every competition. It calmed a lot of nerves and brought our team together in friendship and with God. Not everyone in robotics is a Christian, but some others also came into our prayer times, and I found it amazing how it kick-started their relationship with God.
Kathy Heinrichs Wiest is a freelance writer who loves the smell of whole wheat bread in the oven, the feel of an orange being plucked from the tree and the view from her front porch in Kingsburg, California. On Sunday mornings you’ll find her in the fourth pew from the front on the left at Kingsburg MB Church, moved by the hymns and praise songs and inspired by the stories of God at work locally and around the world. She and her husband, Steve, own Dovetail Remodeling. They have two grown daughters, one son-in-law and a precious granddaughter.
