Girard Robocats gear up for competition

By Sarah Lehr

slehr@vindy.com

GIRARD

For the past several weeks, a group of Girard High School students have gathered every day, including on weekends, in a makeshift garage behind their school.

There, they measure material, weld parts together and perform tests.

About 40 students comprise the Girard High School FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science & Technology) Robotics team, also known as the RoboCats. The RoboCats have six weeks to build a robot fit for sport. Technically, they must build two robots – a test robot and another, which must be completed and sealed off by Tuesday, for use in competition.

That robot’s first show-down will take place March 17-19 in Cleveland for a medieval-themed tournament. If that goes well, the RoboCats hope they eventually will qualify for regional finals, as they did last year, and maybe even national finals.

Ashraf Hadi, technical-education teacher and build team adviser for the RoboCats, says competition gives students a chance bring subjects such as physics, arithmetic and computer programming out of the classroom.

“Let me ask you this: Have you ever sat in a classroom and wondered what this was for?” Hadi said.

Before they begin building, the RoboCats map the entire robot using computer programming. Once they make that model a physical reality, however, problems always arise and those bugs must be corrected before the big face-off.

“I tell them to drive it until it breaks,” Hadi said. “It’s best to find out about any problems beforehand.”

Like many of her fellow RoboCats, sophomore Jenna Testa hopes to enter a STEM field after graduation.

“I think on many other teams, the mentors do a lot of the work,” Testa said. “Here, you get to do things yourself and figure everything out.”

Nick Walker, a senior, said he spent 24 of 48 hours one weekend working on the robot. Walker plans to study engineering in college.

“As our founder says, unlike football or basketball where, if you play in high school, you probably won’t go pro, with this activity you actually do have a really good chance of going pro,” Walker said. “I’d say 90 percent of the people on our team want to go into STEM fields where they’ll be doing something similar to this.”