The robotics team has a long history that many people don’t know about. Though it originally started as a club, the team transferred into a classroom setting two years ago. Grant Houseman, the coach of the team, said, “While it’s challenging to facilitate communication between two periods, the benefits of having designated time each day to work are enormous.”
The robotics team competes in FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), a competition that involves an ever changing robot game that makes teams “build, program, and operate robots to compete in a head-to-head challenge in an alliance format,” according to the FTC website. In this competition, the team frequently makes it to the state competition, and has gone as far as Super-Regionals.
The captain of the team is Justin Sehlin. When describing a typical class period, Sehlin said, “We start off with an overview of what we want to accomplish for the day. Then we split into groups, work on our tasks, take pictures of what we are working on for the engineering notebook, and finally clean everything up before the period is over.”
Many of these tasks are technical. Some students communicate with businesses for grants or design the engineering notebook (a place to document the robot’s design), but many more students are involved in the design, programming, and fabrication of the robot. Houseman said, “We spend the first couple of weeks of class teaching our new members how to use a bandsaw and drill press safely, giving everyone a solid foundation in fabrication. We also work in teaching the basics of Java programming, giving everybody the knowledge to choose what they enjoy.”
Meet day is when all of the team’s hard work comes to fruition. Sehlin loves meets because he is able to see everything come together and feel like as though the team accomplished something. Meets have two parts. The robot game is a head to head competition with other teams, and the winner is the robot that performs the best. The second aspect, judging, is where engineers look through the engineering notebook and decide how innovative a team’s design. Here’s to hoping that PV’s robotics team has another successful season!
