Need a creative way to pick up junk in your room and put it away? Call in the Hastings robotics team. They’d likely be able to design a robot to get the job done.
While the team isn’t exactly working on a shortcut to keeping rooms clean, the robot they’ve spent the season building would probably be up for the challenge.
With around 15 students on the squad, the Hastings team opened March with a tournament at Battle Creek Lakeview High School. This weekend, they will travel to Battle Creek Central High School for their second and final competition.
Led by advisor Chris Stafford, the club gives students a hands-on opportunity to collaborate across multiple disciplines to design, build and program a functioning robot.
Each season of FIRST Robotics Competition brings a new game with a unique theme and objectives. This year’s competition centers on an archaeology-inspired challenge, where robots collect small balls, (or, artifacts) and launch them into a goal. Robots must also complete a climbing task using a small ladder.
“It’s kind of similar to what we’ve done in previous years,” said senior Garrett Sawyer, who has competed in robotics for three years. “If you want to dumb it down, at least for me, it’s usually pick up an object and get the object into a goal.”
That may sound simple, but designing and programming a robot capable of completing those tasks is anything but.
Aidan Oliver, another senior, serves as the team’s head programmer.
“It’s a challenge because the robot doesn’t work if you don’t have the code,” Oliver said. “You can build the whole thing, but if it doesn’t have the brain to it, it won’t do anything.”
Oliver began learning programming concepts as early as fourth grade. Since then, he has taken technology courses and earned nearly a dozen certifications in areas such as HTML and cybersecurity. While classroom learning helped build a foundation, he said robotics pushed his skills even further.
“I am more of a visual learner; a hands-on learner more than sitting in a classroom being taught,” Oliver said. “Throughout my entire life, I’ve taught myself code. I’ve only taken two programming classes and the rest of it has been computer security. So when I got the opportunity to code in real life …It helped me put actual solid foundations down with programming.”
For senior Anna Rose, robotics became a way to expand her interest in engineering. She serves as the team’s lead designer.
“Since freshman year, I started taking CTE classes for engineering. In my sophomore year I was introduce to 3D CAD through SolidWorks, which is the program we use. I just went off with it. I enjoyed doing it. I was great at it.”
The team is divided into subgroups — coders, designers, builders and strategists — but collaboration is essential. Students analyze game rules, develop match strategies and bring their individual work together into one cohesive machine.
At competitions, alliances of three teams face off against another group of three, working together to score as many points as possible.
Beyond the technical skills, students say the experience is what keeps them coming back.
"It's the community of it," Sawyer said. "After my first year of it, I wasn't sure if i wanted to continue with robotics, but after going to the competitions, it was so fun. You go there, you watch robots do their thing and you get hyped. It's really fun! It's something that I think most people would enjoy, honestly."
In a world where industries like manufacturing increasingly rely on automation to handle dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, programs like FIRST Robotics help prepare students with the skills to design and operate those systems.
And along the way, they get to build something impressive...and have a lot of fun doing it.