ROOKIE SUCCESS: Maple Crest robotics team geared up for state | Local news

Both literally and figuratively, Maple Crest STEM Middle School’s robotics team is gearing up for an out-of-this-world experience.

In its inaugural year of First Technology Challenge action, the STEM Kats, team 15255, is set to compete on the state’s top stage when they take part in the 2019 Indiana FTC State Championship at Crawfordsville High School today.

The team, consisting of around 10 students, built a robot from the ground up with minimal supervision from Maple Crest Robotics coach Sid Culp based on this year’s scenario: a spaceship crash-landing on a planet with the robot acting as a rover that goes out and collects minerals and other objects and must then load them into the ship.

“We’ve had a lot of fun,” seventh-grader Alexzander Shoemaker said. “We like competing, and we’ve learned a lot. We can’t wait for the competition.”

Those feelings of confidence and enjoyment are an entirely different mindset from what the team was experiencing in the early going a few months ago.

“On the way to our first competition, we’re heading that way and I’ve got kids saying, … ‘Well maybe we should just watch this time, maybe we shouldn’t even do it,’” STEM Kats coach Sid Culp said. “They were so nervous. I told them, let’s just see what happens.”

To say the team hit the ground running would be an understatement. They ended up making the semifinals that day and took third place out of 30 teams.

In both of their competitions they have ended up the highest scoring rookie team, finishing in the top four each time, which gave them enough points to earn a trip to the State Finals. The State Finals consists of 32 teams from around the state and four alternates.

“The success of our robotics team in its first year of competition is a testament to the power of STEM education, as well as a total staff and student buy-in,” Maple Crest Principal Tom Hughes said. “The decision to transition to the FIRST Technology Challenge League this school year required an incredible amount of time and effort from the robotics team members and Mr. Culp.

“The students embraced the challenge, which included late nights and early mornings, along with countless failures that led to character growth, increased confidence, and positive competition results. The fact that these students started at ground zero this season but managed to qualify for the State Finals is nothing short of incredible.”

Now, a strong showing at state could boost them into the World Championships, which will take place in Detroit April 24-27.

Shoemaker, who celebrated his birthday on Friday, would enjoy the belated gift of a big day at the competition.

“We’re hoping to get to the finals,” Shoemaker said. “If we can get to the finals in state that would be huge.”

At the beginning of the school year, with the newly created team, Culp asked Hughes if instead of being in a little league they could just bite the bullet and go into the big league.

“We took it on and so we’re out there competing against a lot of teams that have been doing this four and five years and we’ve been doing it four or five months,” Culp said.

“Being such a young team, we’re just looking forward to the experience and what we can learn from the other teams [at state], seeing what they’ve done, how they did it and how it worked out for them,” added Culp, who is a technology and STEM teacher at Maple Crest.

Culp said a lot of the process is about learning to work in teams, figuring out how to disagree when they have different ideas of the ways things should be done, and learning to compromise with an idea that works for everybody.

“And then on the programming side of it, I have a couple of guys that they can walk into an industry and kind of have an idea how to program something because they’re using programming,” Culp said. “Aside from that, just a lot of problem solving. There’s always more than one way to do things and a lot of the time the first try doesn’t work and they have to go to plan B.”

The students taught themselves all the programming after Culp gave them the website that showed them how it works.

“One of the nice things about FTC is I’m their mentor, I’m their coach, but I don’t really put my hands on anything,” Culp said. “I let them do it. I kind of stand over them and make sure they stay safe and they’re not breaking things, but it’s their creation. I see things I would like to do different but I don’t say anything. It’s their team and it’s their challenge. That’s one thing that I’m really proud of is what they do is theirs, their ideas and their building.”

Shoemaker actually is responsible for one of the more important pieces of the design.

“You know the hook part, the part that grabs on, I designed that whole thing myself,” Shoemaker said. “And basically when we were thinking of how we were going to do it, we split into teams building their own prototypes to see what worked best.

“We eventually settled on our one-grab design. And it’s actually a lot more consistent. We had to ally with teams in our first competition.”

The FIRST Tech Challenge consists of teams of up to 15 students exploring the possibilities of STEM through designing, building, programming and operating robots to play a competition challenge in an alliance format.

A saving grace for the STEM Kats has been that their robot is simple and therefore hasn’t broken in competition.

“It’s a high-risk, high-reward game,” Shoemaker said. “To take the risk and get a really big, really good robot, you’re going to get a really good reward. But that comes with the risk of it breaking during the competition.”

As part of the FTC challenge, the STEM Kats do community outreach, where they go out into the community and show people what they’re doing and promote it. Over the last few weeks, that took the STEM Kats to Boulevard and Elwood Haynes elementary schools, where they did presentations for students with two robots they had last year.

Last week at Boulevard, Shoemaker was running around with a microphone as the pair of robots drew loud cheers from the elementary students.

Boulevard is in the works of implementing a robotics program, and Elwood Haynes, under its first year as a STEM school, has had a robotics after school club for the past three years.

The addition of the STEM Kats provides a strong link between these elementary schools and the high school’s TechnoKats team.

With that feeder system in place, the robotics program is shaping up to having an even stronger future.

“I think it’s going to help out the high school team a lot,” Culp said. “They’re going to get kids that already know how to assemble things, how to problem solve things, how to program and how to work together. That’s going to be huge.”

Next year, a new robot will be needed for a new challenge, and with that new expenses, which is why the team is seeking sponsorship.

That’s what they’ll be doing next as the members go into promotion mode during the final nine weeks of the year.

“Part of the reason they started building this presentation and started doing this is so we can approach some local industries and local businesses and ask if they can help us out,” Culp said. “It’s such a good tool to get these guys used to what happens around Kokomo as far as robotics and computer programming and all that stuff.”

For more information on sponsorship, Culp can be reached at sculp@kokomo.k12.in.us.