A Saratoga County 4-H robotics team is raising money to go to the World Championships next month.
FIRST Tech Challenge teams from all over the world will be heading to Houston in April after months of designing, optimizing, and competing their robots.
Henry LaBarge is a Ballston Spa High School senior and team manager for the RoBovines. Standing in front of a 12-foot-by-12-foot arena that is divided through the middle, he explains some of the fundamentals.
“During any given match, on the field there’s four robots, and two robots are on each alliance — the red alliance and the blue alliance. And so each year we’re given a different task that the robot has to complete, you’ve got to build a completely new robot each year,” said LaBarge.
This year’s competition requires the teams to navigate the truss that splits the arena in half in order to stack as many multi-colored hexagons called “pixels” as possible in a two-and-a-half-minute window.
“For the mosaics you have to get three pixels in a triangle type form and they have to either be all the same color or all be different colors. So, you can’t have like two purples and a green, it has to be three purples or a yellow purple and green,” said LaBarge.
With four robots in an arena during each match, communication can become a challenge.
A team of three pilots the robot. One controls the movement of the robot. One controls the mechanisms that lift and place the pixels. And a third keeps an eye on which pixels they need to pick up.
Rohan Huskie is the youngest team member at practice, and while he isn’t one of the team’s regular pilots, he’s preparing in case he’s needed in competition.
“It’s just practice, it’s just drive time, it’s just the more you do it the more you get comfortable with it,” said Huskie.
Ethan Thomas of Saratoga Springs is sitting on the other side of the arena, the “human player” who places the needed pixels down for the robot to pick up.
“I’m communicating back to them if [the pixels] are actually getting into the robot, how many they’ve gotten or if we’ve completely missed and they need to back up because I can’t reach my hands in there when there’s a robot for obvious safety reasons and then I get penalized,” said Thomas.
But FIRST competitions don’t just require communication between teammates. Nora Hoke, a Saratoga Springs High School junior, says the organization has coined the term “coopertition.”
“And they say, during one match you’re going to work with this alliance, but you may be against them the next time. And no matter what you should be there to help them, support them and that’s just the amazing thing about competitions,” said Hoke.
Burnt-Hills Ballston Lake senior programmer Corin Gordon puts it another way.
“You want to help the other teams make sure their robot is at their absolute best, so that way you know when you’re against them and you beat them, you beat them at their best,” said Gordon.
The team needs to raise $35,000 to send the members and chaperones to Texas, which Gordon acknowledges is a lot of money.
“We’re starting from zero because there’s these smaller programs for younger kids that we run and we fund and we supply all of the coaches and teachers and everything for as well as the money. So, we do have some money in the bank but since they can’t fund themselves and we need to be there for that, we really want to be able to save that little bit that we have so that we can keep funding those programs,” said Gordon.
The RoBovines help fund robotics programs for around 70 younger kids. That helps foster interest in STEM and creates a natural farm system for the high school team.
Coach Lisa Russell helped found the program and says this year’s win at the state championship was due to the team’s dedication to community outreach.
“I’ve been saying this since I started 11 years ago, yeah, the robot’s cool. If I can see these kids get more self-assured, don’t have a problem public speaking, want to share this stuff, that’s the stuff that’s gonna come in their lives later on,” said Russell.
There’s more information on the team its efforts to get to the FIRST world championship starting April 17th at wamc.org.
