NMH Robotics Has Strong Showing at State Championships

The NMH Robotics Team came up big in this year’s Massachusetts High School VEX V5 Robotics Competition State Championship, with two of the four student-designed robots making it to the semifinals and one robot advancing to the World Championships in Dallas this spring.

The Vex V5 Robotics State Championship, held Feb. 22 to 23, pitted 65 high school teams from across the state against each other over two days in a engineering design and skills competition, with the highest-ranking teams advancing to the finals rounds. During competition, points are awarded for a variety of tasks the robots can do to score points for themselves or reduce the score of the opposing team.

This year, the NMH contingent was represented by four teams: Apollo 13.1, Babylon, Millennium, and Wall-E. While past NMH teams have come close to qualifying for the state championship, this is the first year that all four robots made it and the first time an NMH team has qualified for the World Championship, said Nhu Gonzalez Hoang, chair of the science department and an advisor to the team.

“We have young students interested in the program vying for a spot on the team; we have students who have participated in the World Championship before during their time in middle school and elementary school,” Hoang said. “The teams this year have collaborated very well and persevered through numerous rebuilds and setbacks. Our teams were also very strategic, not only in their design and redesigns of their robots but also in how they approach these qualifying tournaments.”

Babylon team co-leader Laurence Pan ’27 said that the state championships offered an exciting new level to the competition that the NMH team hadn’t experienced before. “States is much more competitive,” Pan said. “There are all the teams from across Massachusetts. There’s definitely more pressure, but at the end of the day, you feel like it's more important.”

By the end of the 10 qualification rounds, two NMH robots – Apollo 13.1 and Babylon – had scored highly enough to advance to the elimination rounds. During eliminations, two-team alliances are formed, with the highest-ranking teams picking whom they want to align with from among the other qualifiers.

“Vex robotics is definitely not just engineering,” said Claire Takeuchi ’25, the other co-leader of the Babylon team. “There's a lot more that goes into it. A lot of times, when you're planning an alliance with a team, you have to convince them that you have what they lack. A lot more skills go into this than you would think: a lot of communication, a lot of explaining what your robot does. It's really not just engineering.”

Apollo 13.1 ranked 2nd out of all 65 teams going into the quarterfinals but was derailed when its robot was disconnected midway through the competition. Despite the heartbreaking ending, Apollo team member Tad Coleman ’27 said the experience offered valuable insights he and his team can carry into the future.

“The state championship taught a very important lesson about build quality, because that was the first tournament we had gone to where nothing on our robot broke,” Coleman said. “The biggest lesson, though, would be that you can't ever control how something will turn out; you can only control how you approach it.”

Babylon, ranked at number 25 overall, began the elimination round against the number 1 seed of the tournament, besting that team by 11 points and securing a spot at the World Championship this May. For the Babylon team, the victory was a fairytale ending to what had been a tumultuous journey to the state championships, said Junsang Ryu ’27, noting that this was the team’s fifth attempt to get there. 

Babylon’s success is the result of the hard work and perseverance of the team members, several of whom were new to the NMH robotics team this year, said June Suh ’27, who does much of the coding for the Babylon robot. “We dedicated ourselves to this – ending all of our study halls in the robotics room, doing this every day,” he said. “We worked really hard.”

Emily Liu ’27, who is new to the team this year, credited the leadership of Pan and Takeuchi, noting that their drive and passion helped set a high standard for the rest of the team.

“For me, the whole learning curve was a hard thing to get over,” Liu said. “Laurence was a great mentor: He basically taught me all the different mechanics. Everyone on the robotics team has really taught me so much. It’s been awesome.”

Takeuchi, who’s been on the robotics team since 9th grade, hopes this year’s success will inspire more female students to get involved in the activity. “When I first came in my freshman year, I was really intimidated by robotics as a whole, because I was one of three girls at the time, and everyone was new,” she said. “I'm really glad I stuck with it, because I feel like I've been able to help other women on our team feel more comfortable.”

The 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship will be held in Dallas from May 6 to May 14.