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At the Valley View Casino Center, on the morning of April 3rd, the atmosphere was hectic. With the music blaring, the arena packed with kids, and the enthusiastically loud announcer, it would be easy to think you were at a concert. However, if you had thought that, you would be mistaken. What was taking place was the 9th annual San Diego Regional Robotics Competition - a collection of STEM nerds and robot builders from all around California, who had come to participate in competitions between their robots.
STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and it represents what FIRST robotics, the company that puts on the competition, is all about. High school students who participate are given a task every year - to collaborate on building a robot that could complete in a specific game. This year, the game was called Recycle Rush. In order to gain points, teams had to work together to pick up storage totes using their robot, and stack them systematically. On top of the stacks, you had to place a cylindrical recycling container, which multiplied the points gained by the stack.
The 70+ teams in the Regional competition all addressed the problem in various ways, but High Tech High North County’s team, the Top Hat Technicians, chose to use a chain based conveyer system. It had hooks to pick up both the storage totes, and the recycling containers. It seemed to be an effective design, since there were similar ideas used by a lot of the other competing teams.
Schools were all given only six weeks to design, prototype, and build their robots, so they all had small kinks to be worked out. The Top Hat Technicians, however, were faced with one of the biggest “kinks” of them all. One of the chains that connected a wheel to its motor consistently fell off, leaving the wheel unpowered. After about five matches with a constantly broken chain, the team made a unanimous decision: Just take the chain off, it’s not worth it.
By the final matches of day two, the team had fixed the chain, but, sadly, they couldn’t recover from the low scores they had earned previously. The team faced many challenges; pairings with other teams who were also struggling with their designs/mechanical limitations, their own broken wheel, chain and other problems, they didn’t have the chance to raise their rank higher than a 55 out of 60. In the end, though, the team learned a valuable lesson. It didn’t matter that they had come out so close to the bottom of the ranks. They had learned about the teamwork and collaboration necessary to build the robot in the first place.
STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and it represents what FIRST robotics, the company that puts on the competition, is all about. High school students who participate are given a task every year - to collaborate on building a robot that could complete in a specific game. This year, the game was called Recycle Rush. In order to gain points, teams had to work together to pick up storage totes using their robot, and stack them systematically. On top of the stacks, you had to place a cylindrical recycling container, which multiplied the points gained by the stack.
The 70+ teams in the Regional competition all addressed the problem in various ways, but High Tech High North County’s team, the Top Hat Technicians, chose to use a chain based conveyer system. It had hooks to pick up both the storage totes, and the recycling containers. It seemed to be an effective design, since there were similar ideas used by a lot of the other competing teams.
Schools were all given only six weeks to design, prototype, and build their robots, so they all had small kinks to be worked out. The Top Hat Technicians, however, were faced with one of the biggest “kinks” of them all. One of the chains that connected a wheel to its motor consistently fell off, leaving the wheel unpowered. After about five matches with a constantly broken chain, the team made a unanimous decision: Just take the chain off, it’s not worth it.
By the final matches of day two, the team had fixed the chain, but, sadly, they couldn’t recover from the low scores they had earned previously. The team faced many challenges; pairings with other teams who were also struggling with their designs/mechanical limitations, their own broken wheel, chain and other problems, they didn’t have the chance to raise their rank higher than a 55 out of 60. In the end, though, the team learned a valuable lesson. It didn’t matter that they had come out so close to the bottom of the ranks. They had learned about the teamwork and collaboration necessary to build the robot in the first place.
Written by Kirsten Zornado