Our Beginnings
Article in the Eagle Eye campus newspaper
|
"Why don't we?" The question hung in the air. And then, the answer was obvious. "Let's do it!" And with that, a partnership was born. That was 2002. The conversation between Mount Paran Christian School Science Department Chair Brad Smith and the late Southern Polytechnic State Mechatronics Professor R. Glenn Allen was sealed with an agreement to pilot a middle school robotics challenge.
Students would learn how to program a miniaturized industry-style Rhino XR-4 robot trainer to sort VHS cassettes to and from a turntable library. The elective class would involve programming, some physics, and a lot of hands-on learning. Students would visit SPSU for field experiences in Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering, and would ultimately compete against each other in a end-of-course showdown. |
|
Students navigated the challenge with gusto. Learning how to navigate six degrees of freedom to imitate the human range of motion was not easy, but students learned a lot. And they enjoyed it! Hands-on learning was the way to go!
Students thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. They enjoyed the field trip through the robotics trainers at SPSU. They even seemed to enjoy the frustrating difficulty. Suddenly science and math mattered. Suddenly engineering wasn't an abstraction. It was a real thing people did. After the project was over, Dr. Allen approached Mr. Smith. "What we're doing with a small group of kids needs to be done across other middle schools and high schools," he said. It was shortly after that conversation that Dr. Allen agreed to form a Georgia hub of the organization called BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology). Southern Poly Tech would become the hosting partner for an interscholastic statewide robotics competition. And he invited us to get in on the ground floor with it during its inaugural year. We gratefully accepted his invitation, and thus our competition robot team was born. None of us knew what to expect, but that was part of the fun - the anticipation! |
|
Competition Progress
|
|
So, in 2003 we joined Georgia BEST. The competitions were based on a game, played head-to-head against other teams from other schools.
Teams were provided a kit of raw materials, some electronic components and radio frequency controllers. They were told how the game worked, but not how to build a robot. They were sent home with the promise to play the game in six weeks... and may the best robot win. The 2003 game was named "Transfusion Confusion." The game centered around transporting balloons around the game floor. The balloons were color-coded, and trapped in a cage with a fan beneath them that made them mobile targets. We were novices, and not very good at this yet, and we didn't do so well. But we learned quickly what to do and how to do it. We also learned that by placing high enough in the hub competition teams could advance to the southeast regional at Auburn University. But best of all, we began to sow the seeds of enthusiasm for supporting competitive robotics at our school. In time that would pay great dividends. We returned after competition, regrouped, and got ready for the next year. At this point were hooked. Students saw the value of the learning and the fun in doing robotics, and there was no turning back! |
To see a year-by-year look at each of our subsequent competitions in BEST, just choose the year you'd like to review from the drop-down menu under the "About Us" tab at the top of this page! If you'd like to explore our competitions after the transition to FIRST, select "FTC Competition History" under the "FIRST Tech Challenge" menu tab.
