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Robotics contest at MCCTC draws 120 Ohio students
By Sean Barron
CANFIELD
Even though Sammy Dwyer, Marik Rogenski, Diego Calderon, Sam Delatore and Matthew Commons built GEORGE to be mechanical, fluidity is what largely defined what went into the process.
“Multiple designs didn’t work, so we had to rebuild it,” explained Dwyer, referring to the robot he and the other four Poland Seminary High School students created. “This is the best design we could come up with.”
The five freshmen and sophomores, who are on their school’s robotics team, were among the more than 120 high- and middle-school students who competed in Saturday’s Mahoning Valley VEX Robotics Qualifier Competition at the Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, 7300 N. Palmyra Road.
Thirty-two teams from 12 high schools and middle schools throughout Ohio competed with and against one another in the five-hour tournament, which consisted of a series of back-to-back challenges. The four local teams were from Poland Seminary High, MCCTC, Chaney High School’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics program and Lowellville K-12 School.
The top finisher and the winner of an Excellence Award will compete in the state tournament, set for March 5 in Marion, Ohio.
It took about two months for the five Poland High students to assemble GEORGE, which features a conveyor belt for lifting colored balls that were used in Saturday’s competition for a game called Nothing But Net, Calderon said.
The students’ robot also has a cortex that acts as its nerve center to which numerous wires are connected. It receives signals from a controller who programs the movements, he continued.
Also assisting the team was Mum Masaki, a fellow Poland High student.
During the Nothing But Net tournaments, competitors began with autonomous periods in which they were given 15 seconds to program their robots in three square enclosures containing synthetic nets into which they were to shoot colored balls. After that, they had 1 minute, 45 seconds to drive and control the robots with remote-control devices that allowed them to shoot the balls, noted Walter Baber, MCCTC’s engineering instructor.
The object of the game was to post the most points by scoring the regular and bonus balls into low and high goal nets, and by elevating the robots in climbing zones, Baber explained.
In addition, a bonus was awarded to teams that had the most total points at the end of the autonomous periods.
“The students design, program and build their robots to hit the nets,” Baber said. “This is all student-driven. They go through the engineering-design process, do a lot of testing and troubleshooting.”
The Excellence Award was based mainly on how well the students played the game and on their notebooks that contained the steps they took to build and design the robots, he continued, adding that the competition also instills in the participants valuable life skills such as teamwork and leadership.
“Basically, it’s the engineering side of the scientific method,” said Dylon Caudill, regional-support manager for the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, which helped to develop the Nothing But Net game.
The REC Foundation seeks to deepen an interest in science, technology and engineering by offering students a variety of hands-on, curriculum-based robotics programs across the U.S. and internationally, according to its website.
VEX Robotics Inc. is said to be one of the world’s fastest-growing such programs for elementary-, middle- and high-school students as well as those in college.