MOUNT VERNON – A Mount Vernon Middle School team is having a really good season this winter and could make it to the state tournament, but it’s probably not one that fans would typically follow.
It’s the robotics team.
The team has been busy with weekend tournaments all around Ohio this winter, including one in January that was hosted in Mount Vernon.
“We’ve been doing very well,” coach Emily Miller told the Mount Vernon News. “We have one more regular-season tournament and after that will be state. We’re working on state qualifying spots.”
The team has four robots, Smith said.
“Right now, two of our robot teams are tied for the top-20 spot in skills out of all the teams in Ohio,” Smith said.
Mount Vernon High School does not currently have a robotics team.
While making it the state tournament — to be held in Marion in April — is a goal, learning along the way is even more valuable for the students, Smith said.
Part of the competition involves the students’ notebooks, which hold sketches and written descriptions of everything they did to the robots and why they did it. The notebooks are judged by industry professionals.
“On each team, there is a student who is in charge of the engineering notebook,” Smith said. “Then all the students have to go through interviews with the industry professionals.”
At the Mount Vernon tournament in January, judges were engineers from Ariel Corp., the compressor manufacturer.
As the students engage in the various competitions, they are constantly revising and improving their robots, learning in part from other teams, Smith said.
“They’re continually making the bot better, coding better,” she said.
For the first 15 seconds of each match, the robots are autonomous, operating on coded instructions.
“It is pre-coded by the students,” Smith said. “They code the bot to do specific things.”
Students also code the robots to respond to a remote control in a later “driver” phase of the contest.
Additionally, as part of the competition, students talk to other teams to find out what their robots can do and how the robots from opposing teams can work together, Smith explained. Later in the competition, the students choose an “alliance team.”
“You are trying the whole day to figure out who you want to pick,” she said. “Some people get to pick, some people get picked, and some people don’t get picked and don’t get in the tournament at all.”
If that sounds fun, it is; but it is also educational for future careers and life in general, Smith noted.
“It brings together the skills of all the members on the team,” she said. “You can’t really be successful if your team only has a good builder. You need a good coder. You need someone who can keep an engineering book that is very detailed and have very clear sketches. All of the skills are required to be successful. It’s a great starting place for many different careers.”
