Robotics Competition, 1/25/2018

On Thursday night, January 25th, we had a great turnout for the first Robotics competition of the 2017-18 school year. Twenty-five students competed in four competitions, entering robots that were the product of imagination, innovation, and plenty of hard work.

The four competitions were "Slope Climbing Robot," "Speed Robot," "Delivery Robot," and "Table Clearing Robot." 

For the first time ever, we had two robots complete the delivery course! Iris Hennin, an 8th grader at WCS completed the course on her first try (an amazing accomplishment) with a time of 20.16 seconds. Riley Dunn and Dalton Johnstone, both 7th graders at BMS had the winning time, completing the course in 17.46 seconds. It took them five tries to finally succeed!

Three robots competed in the speed competition. Josiah Keller and Chris Swinburne, 6th and 7th graders respectively at BMS, took third place with a time of 14.55 seconds to complete the 18 foot course. Second place was Tyler McCarren, an 8th grader from WCS with a time of 7.17 seconds. The winners were Sam Taft and Alex O'Camb, both 8th graders at BMS with an extraordinarily fast time of 2.86 seconds. 

Just one robot was entered in the Slope Climbing Competition. Tyler McCarren and Eban Keach, 8th graders at WCS, built a robot that managed to climb a 55˚ slope with ease.

Finally, in the Table Clearing competition, four robots successfully completed the challenge. Riley Gale, 6th grader at WCS in 31.65 seconds, Seamus Philbrick and Sonya Viselli, 6th graders at BMS in 29.5 seconds, Lucas Martin and Nathan Goodman, 8th and 7th graders respectively at BMS in 20.96 seconds, and Cody Stewart and Severen Denyer, both 7th graders at BMS in 19.86 seconds.

Lucas Martin made two robots for the table clearing event, one that met the criterion of fitting inside a cubic foot of space, and one that fit a square foot but extended up three vertical feet. Below is a video of the "legal" robot and the "illegal" robot. We allowed Lucas to run the "illegal" 'bot as a fun demonstration. It cleared the table in just 9.8 seconds!

Congratulations to every single contestant. The spirit of friendly competition, good sportsmanship and dogged determination in the context of math, science and engineering was wonderful to see. We will be hosting the annual SUMO challenge in early May, and we hope to see you there!