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Union High School’s robotics program added some more hardware to its already impressive trophy case this month.

The team finished third overall at the BEST Robotics Regional held March 1-2 at Grove City College. The teams are judged on five criteria: the robot itself, the marketing exhibit, the oral presentation spirit, and sportsmanship, and the notebook.

The notebook is essentially a dossier which outlines the entire project. It holds plans, photos, game strategy and design details from every step of the process. According to one of the instructors leading the team, John Westcott, the appendix in this notebook was over 30 pages long. The notebook placed first in the regional.

Westcott works with Robert Miller, another Union Area Middle/High School teacher, leading the team which is now in its sixth year. The team has already made it to five regional events. Four of those events ended with the team coming home with a trophy highlighting their success in at least one category.

“BEST announces the rules of the game in August, and the first event is in mid-October. So we get that amount of time to plan, build and get ready to compete at Grove City College,” Miller said.

This year’s rules involved building a robot capable of cleaning up trash and microplastics in the ocean.

“It was a very complicated game. We had to build a robot which could withstand the currents and get the garbage out of the ocean to our field scientists. The field scientists had to be able to measure the currents of the water and got our team bonus points if all of the field scientists had the same measurements,” Miller said.

The first meet of the season, or the hub, is for robotics teams in the area. Union advanced past the hub, but not in a way the instructors would have liked.



Union robotics students earn recognition

The team’s newest additions are the trophy and medal on the far right, and the two dark plaques in the middle. The trophy and medal are for finishing third overall, the plaques are for finishing first in oral presentation and the notebook. l Jacob Ruffo 

“The top three teams overall advance, but also the top three teams in the robot grading also advance. We made it through placing second with our robot, but our overall score would not have been good enough. Our oral presentation finished 15th, which is awful,” Miller said.

“The robot is actually the category with the second-to-smallest impact on the grading. When we recruit for the team, some kids are so shocked we would ask them. We don’t just ask kids who can build. We need kids who can write, we need kids who can sell our robots to the judges,” Westcott said.

According to Miller a lot of the practices between the hub and the regional events focused on the oral presentation, and the team bounced back to take first in the oral presentation at the regional.

Arnaud Evrard, an exchange student from Belgium and a senior on the team was primarily involved in the building of the robot.

“The first part we designed was the base, it had to be able to handle the movement of the currents. We thought the arm would be hard to design. If we had the base first, we would be able to test different arms with it,” Evrard said.

Between the hub and the regional, the teams can tinker with their robot as much as they would like. One part of the robot that underwink tinkering for Union was the basket at the end of the arm.

“We tried three different pans, a claw and this current iteration, which just kind of pushes the garbage to the field scientists as opposed to picking it up. With our dust pan style design we took second at the hub, but we thought we could do better. I don’t know if we made it better, but it made it easier to control,” Miller said.

Miller said the version attached to the robot for the regional was put on that morning.

Miller said that in his 21-year teaching career, this robotics team is his favorite student organization with which he has worked.

“Six years ago we started with six great kids. Now, we have thirty and that is about the limit of what we can handle. You see kids that would ordinarily seemingly never talk to each other, and after one practice they’re friends. The events are essentially sporting events for the kids. I have to wear earplugs,” Miller said.

Currently, the team isn’t practicing, as the season is over. When school starts up they will have about one or two weeks before the rules of the game are announced. From there, they prepare for the hub.

jruffo@ncnewsonline.com 

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