The floor is set. The yellow balls sit neatly in the middle. The host counts down the match, and the robots are off. The code meticulously programmed, steers the robot toward the central neutral zone, the goal: gathering as many balls (or fuel) as possible. Once the hopper is filled, the competitors guide their robots back and begin to shoot the balls into the hub on their side of the field. Fighting against their opponents, and the clock, to score points.
Three.
Two.
One.
The buzzer hits. The teams step back and applaud for each other. Their first robotics meet of the year has ended and Ratchet Rockers have won.
Team 1706 won the Oklahoma Regional, a week one competition, without losing a single match.
They have seen their hard work actualised on the battlefield. They now know what they should improve on, and the competition they are up against.
“We compete in a new game every year, everyone across the world receives [the prompt] at the same time in early January,” Brenden Buchanan (11) said.
Buchanan is on the computer-aided design (CAD) team, along with being one of the team’s drivers. His assignment on the CAD team this year was to create an indexing mechanism.
“This started with making quick wood prototypes to test different ideas we wanted to try, and eventually turned into the first complete version of the system,” Buchanan said.
After three years on the team, Buchanan’s favorite part is not innovating, but meeting new people through robotics meets.
“I have met people from countries like China, Australia, and Mexico. All of these people have knowledge to share and I find it so cool,” Buchanan said. “Seeing all of the different robots and stories these people have to share is what I really enjoy.”
Not only is robotics a good place to meet new people, it also opens paths to future careers. With plenty of diverse STEM options, robotics can help students find what they are passionate about in the STEM field.
“I joined robotics because I thought it would help me get an idea of what a job in an engineering field would look like. It helps give you real life skills with CAD, programming, manufacturing, electrical engineering, etc.,” Izzy Hufty (12), one of the team’s programmers, said. “There is just so much you can learn and I think that’s pretty fun.”
Robotics is a great way to develop engineering and people skills. It teaches teamwork and ingenuity. The best example of this is the World Championships in April. In order to make it to this competition it takes lots of hard work and time.
The team begins preparing for the championship in January, meeting five days a week. At these meetings, all the teams gather together and discuss what needs to be done, before splitting into their sub groups.
With weeks of work put into preparing their robot for competition, it is no surprise that they placed first at the Oklahoma Regional competition that took place March 5-7. This victory is a good sign for the upcoming season.
