A team of six tweens is representing Portage County in a global robotics competition in Houston, Texas that began on Wednesday and concludes Saturday.
Both the team members and the mentors who help them with their projects were stunned to make it so far in the competition.
“Only two teams from the state will go to the real championship,” said team member Liam Wiker, 14. "And then this year we were invited to go to the world championship.”
The team, named Charged Up!, which includes members Ashvik Papannagari, 11, Greyson Brewer, 10, Milo Plough, 10, Neve Plough, 12 and Logan Crawley, 10, has been working on their robots, “Gerald,” “Jimmy” and “GoodBoi” since August.
After winning the state-level competition in Troy, Ohio in March, Charged Up! is now competing against 160 teams from across the globe.
Charged Up! is a part of KSS Robotics, a nonprofit whose mission is to "enable, encourage and support student participation in STEM education programs" within Portage and Summit Counties.
The team has been working on two projects provided by the organization For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, which organizes the competitions. The projects are the “robot game” and the “innovation” project.
The “robot game” requires the team build an autonomous Lego robot powered by a “spike hub,” said Mentor and parent Liz Crawley. The kids must program the robot to complete two missions.
“This season, they can earn up to about 500 points from all the different missions on the field,” Liz Crawley said. “Their robot is doing fairly strong in that area. It hasn't got quite to 500, but they've got about 465 [as] their highest score so far.”
The other project is based on a real-world challenge focused on the connect between STEM and art.
For this, the kids said they created a Lego course full of art-related hobbies for their robot, GoodBoi, to perform so those who cannot perform the tasks themselves due to accessibility reasons, can try the hobbies out.
"There's lots of hindrances that keep us from trying new things," Liz Crawley said. "With their project Dip n' Dabble, you can try it virtually with a VR headset and a robot that can go out in the field, and then you can see through a 360 camera everything that the robot sees."
Other than being judged on the concept and the actual robot itself, the team is also being judged on their ability to have their task finished within a two-and-a-half-minute span.
“I'm scared because the people that we're competing against are much more far in the season and have probably been doing it years longer than we have,” said Logan Crawley, one of the team members.
Although each team member works and learns about every aspect of the creation process, Charged Up! members each have their own areas they love to work on.
“Since I was born, I’ve always loved building,” Wiker said. "I’ve always loved Legos.”
Wiker, who is one of the team’s original members, wants to be a mechanical engineer when he grows up.
The ability of the children to see themselves as a future scientist or engineer is a real perk of the team, said Coach and parent Josh Crawley.
“You know just gentle nudging and pushing and telling them to keep going and keep going, the improvements really start to happen,” he said. “That’s when they start to see these ‘ah-ha’ moments and then they see it themselves, you know like, oh my gosh, we did it.”
