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Fitch hosts Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Cardinal Mooney High School's robot (5077) attempted to gain control of its ball during a qualifying heat for the Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Several teams' robots zipped around the course during one of the qualifying heats during the Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Members of the Cardinal Mooney High School robotics team worked on their robot in the pits after the first qualifying heat at Austintown Fitch High School.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Youngstown State University President Jim Trelle spoke before the start of the 2014 Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge at Austintown Fitch High School.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Canfield High School's robot sat ready to compete before a qualifying heat for the Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge at Austintown Fitch High School.
By TIM CLEVELAND
With there being a large expense to enter robotics competitions, Andy Yantes and the Austintown Fitch team decided to host its own competition, the Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge, with minimal expense for teams that wanted to enter.
“We’re given a game in the first week of January,” he said. “Every team is given the same set of rules. We’re given that game and we’re told to build a robot. We have six weeks to design, prototype and build a robot. We have six weeks put into that robot initially. We cannot touch that robot after that six weeks until we got to competition.
“Once we go to competition, we are able to fiddle with our robot again. Those usually are in March. It was a lot of time and effort into it. It costs us $5,000 to attend an event. We decided we wanted to do something that was local and it’s cheap for teams to come to. We charged $100 to come here and compete.”
The event attracted 21 teams from Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In robotics competitions, each robot performs the same tasks. The task was for each robot to take a two-foot exercise ball and pass it among the other robots in its alliance, shoot it over a 7-foot tall truss and shoot it into a goal.
Yantas said organizing the event was a group effort.
“The organization has come from the NEO FRA [Northeast Ohio First Robotics Alliance],” he said. “It’s those six teams [Austintown Fitch, Cardinal Mooney, Canfield, Champion, Warren G. Harding and Girard] that have come together and worked together to make this happen. We’ve been planning for the last six months.”
The Canfield robotics team is beginning its third year. In that time, it won three rookie of the year awards, including one at the Pittsburgh competition that qualified it to the world championships in 2012 in St. Louis.
“We’ve always had a JETS [Junior Engineering Technical Society] team to do engineering stuff, so it extended into this robotics team,” said Dominic Massuri, one of the team’s mentors. “There was a lot of interest there. They were doing the smaller robots like the YSU robotics team.”
Massuri’s daughter, Marie Massuri, is a junior at Canfield. She said being on the robotics team has helped her engineering skills.
“It’s definitely helped me,” she said. “I know that I want to become an engineer. I wired the last robot and it’s got me learning how to do that and I want to go onto college and do that.”
Cardinal Mooney mentor Raymond Marks said he’s been pleased with the results his team has had in its first year of existence. Mooney qualified for the state competition in Dayton at the beginning of May.
“We were introduced to it by our principal, John Young,” he said. “When he was the principal at Liberty they had a team there. I teach science at the school, so it was just a natural fit.
“This has been so fantastic. This is so unlike any other competition I’ve ever been on. I was the head coach of Mooney’s lacrosse team, and when you think competition you think you’re coming at each other. That’s not this at all. In our first competition, we had eight people on the team and 20 people helping out in the pit.”
Marks said students who participate in the robotics team learn vital skills.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to learn the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) principles,” he said. “Collaboration, working together, technical ability.”