NANKIN — In its first of year of having a robotics team that competes, Mapleton Middle School is sending two teenage students to Kentucky to compete in the VEX Robotics World Championship in April.
The pair has been prepping for this competition since the start of the school. There’s a lot of complicated configuring and programming that goes into creating a robot that is able to complete different tasks throughout the competition.
There can be a total of four people per team, but Mapleton Middle school’s team only has two: Kyle Phillips and Jacob Bates. Their team name is Override and they’ve named their loyal steed of a robot, Steve.
The competition includes a skills portion as well as a portion where teams are pair up randomly and have to work together. For the skills portion, there’s a part that tests the student’s ability to operate the robot.
“They have one minute to remotely control their robot to make it do all these things,” said Craig Wentworth, the Mapleton teacher who leads the robotics team. “Get the hubs in, stack the hubs, lift the hubs up in the air and hang from a pole.”
Hubs are these plastic cylinders that are colored to represent a point value. Teams earn points by performing various tasks with these hubs, such as stack them or move them to a specific location.
During the driving skills portion, operators of the robot have to switch every 30 seconds, so both Kyle and Jacob will have a turn driving the robot. There is also a programming part of the competition.
“They have to use the computer to program the robot,” Wentworth said. “They cannot use the remote control and it has to do all these things based on the codes that they’ve used.”
Judges combine the scores of the driving and programming portions and then teams are assigned a score. For the third part of the competition, two teams are randomly paired up based on how well they performed earlier.
With their new teammates, teams must have their robots work together to complete tasks as fast as they can and try to rack up the highest score possible. Prior to competing, newly matched teams get the opportunity to strategize for the upcoming competition.
Because the layout of the “field” changes every year, students are forced to adapt the way they design their robots. Over 400 middle schools compete at this competition; 67 of those schools in Ohio.
When asked if robots would one day take over the world, Jacob Bates promptly responded with, “Probably.” It all must depend on who’s programming the robots.
Because the price to register for this competition and for the trip is hefty, Wentworth stated that donations from the community would be greatly appreciated.
