This year, as an effort to try and expand the boundaries of our program, I thought it would be nice to look into acquiring some robotics equipment for students to explore with. Many students have expressed interest, and in the past we’ve done some work with smaller robots, but this year I wanted to go bigger and more custom.
After sharing these interests with our director, Mr. Matt LaVerde, he put me in touch with Tim Heffernan (President and CEO of Innovation Institute for Tomorrow, Inc.). Tim was extremely friendly and able to help secure us over $5000 worth of robotics equipment through the PASmart grant! We received 2 VEX clawbot kits, a VEX field kit, and all the materials to practice for this year’s competition! I am extremely grateful for all of this. In return, we will be entering into at least one VEX robotics competition this year.
The equipment arrived in December and two robotics teams were formed (one in AM, one in PM). The AM team currently consists of Arlo Russell (10th grade), Zeph Burek (11th), Francis Trigilio (11th) and Walker Owens (11th). The PM team currently consists of Zac Long (11th), Will Downey (11th) and Liam Schroeck (11th).
In early January, the teams got started building their robots. For the first iteration, we just build the claw bot by following the instructions provided. This robot build is not one that will do well in this year’s competition (game manual – “over-under”), but I wanted to groups to have one successful and complete build before trying to build something more custom for the game.
Each group took about a day to build the robot. It was very exciting and joyous as they drove their robots around in the Skills Center hallways and our classroom.
At the time of writing this (January 9th, 2024), this is the point we are at. Our next step will be to develop plans for builds that will be more appropriate for this year’s competition (able to pick up triballs), and explore programming the robot to work autonomously for the first part of the competition. Additionally, I need to learn about how to enter into a competition and make sure the teams have something put together to compete. I definitely feel a little behind in this area simply due to us not getting started until now, but everyone in the field has been quite friendly, so hopefully we can figure that out.
Our next build 23-24 Hero Bot (the “Striker”): https://kb.vex.com/hc/en-us/articles/15962639615764-Getting-Started-with-VRC-23-24-Robot-Design-Over-Under
The competition we are aiming for will be in Harborcreek on 2/24/2024.
When it comes time for the competition, our expectations are modest. We know we will be going up against far more experienced teams, but we just want to learn and have fun this year. It’s our understanding that we will be paired up with another random team, so hopefully those teams are out to have fun as well!
So far this has been a great experience. There is so much to learn, and it’s all very exciting. Coding is fun, but it’s nice to get something a little more hands-on every now and again. I’ll follow up with another article at the next milestone of this adventure.
