Dozens of students from across the state will be on campus of Lamar School this Saturday as they look to qualify for the Mississippi FIRST Tech Challenge robotics competition in Oxford in March.
Lamar School’s robotics team, the Robotic Raiders, has already qualified for the state championship and will serve as hosts at this weekend’s event.
“We’ll have 22 teams coming from Tupelo to Biloxi on Saturday, and they will be competing in our new gym,” said Lamar teacher Phyllis Skipper, who is the sponsor of the school’s robotics team. “Four out of the 22 will advance to state.”
Skipper said the Lamar team has successfully competed at two of five qualifiers that have already been held in the state. The team finished first at a qualifier at Brandon High School in December and was a finalist at a tournament at St. Patrick Catholic High School in Biloxi in January.
“Right now, we are ranked first in the state, so I am pretty proud of them,” Skipper said of her team.
The international robotics program, called FIRST Tech Challenge, is sponsored in the state by the University of Mississippi’s Center for Mathematics and Science Education. The state championship will be held at the university on March 8-9.
The robotics program is about more than just building robots to run through an obstacle course. Team members, guided by coaches and mentors, are challenged to design, build, program and operate their robots to compete in a head-to-head challenge in an alliance format. The program’s aim is to engage students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills, while fostering creativity and teaching them to work as a team.
“I may not go into robotics, but I have learned so much more than just robotics — team building, 3D printing, CAD,” Lamar junior Devon Poole said of his last several years on the Robotic Raiders team. ”There’s a lot of stuff that I may or may not use (in my future career), but it has been an interesting and fun experience to learn all of this stuff.”
Junior Avery Becton, who plans to pursue an engineering degree, said it is pretty cool to build a robot and to watch it compete at a tournament.
“I come from a farm family, so I don’t have many high tech robots. I have a tractor, and that’s about as technical as it gets around our house,” he said, jokingly. “But this … being able to actually build a piece of machinery instead of being the guy behind the controller … that’s what interests me, building the robot.”
Robotics is a good foundation for all of the different fields of engineering, so Reed Rainey, who pilots the robot and handles the computer programming, feels he is gaining invaluable experience that will be useful when he majors in engineering in college.
Skipper, who has taught at Lamar for more than three decades, brought the idea for the robotics team to her principal eight years ago after witnessing a demonstration at a book store in Ridgeland.
“I thought that is cool, our school should have that,” she said.
After receiving approval to begin the club, Skipper put out an announcement asking for interested students.
“I think we had five kids the first year we competed,” she said, “and we’ve worked really hard and we’ve gone to state every year. Our school is really supportive of this because STEM is so important. Quite a few of our students go on to college and become engineers so this is a good launch pad for them.”
Lamar’s Robotic Raiders team is made up of 13 members in grades seventh through 11th. Under FIRST Tech rules, the maximum allowed on a team is 15 in grades 7th through 12th from private, public or home schools, as well as youth or scouting organizations.
Anchoring Lamar’s robotics team is a group of eight juniors, including Becton, Poole, Rainey, Aiden Becton, Dylan Engell, Jackson Frazier, Alan Tynes and Juliet Utsey. Other members are freshmen Owen Becton and Toby Robbins, eighth graders Harlie Harkless and Audrey Lee and seventh grader Cora Kyle.
At the beginning of each year, the students start from scratch in building a robot, deciding as a team on the design, the types of parts to be used, and the functions they want the robot to perform.
“We’ll have everyone on the team come up with a design, and then we will vote on it,” said Aiden Becton.
The students will continue to tweak the robot as the year goes along and sometimes come back from competition with ideas to make it stronger, more precise in its movements or faster.
“Time is a big thing in this game,” Poole said. “You only have two and a half minutes to get everything you want to get down (in a matchup.) If something takes 20 seconds to do, that is a long amount of time.”
During a competition, Skipper said each team competes with their robot in a head-to-head game and presents a 15-page portfolio about the team and the robot.
“They also have a 10-minute interview that they go through, where they tell about how their robot was developed and outreach or service projects that they do in the community,” she said.
From the March state competition, two teams will advance to the world FIRST Championship, an international event in youth robotics competition, to be held in Houston April 17-20.
The Robotic Raiders are working hard to be one of those two teams.