Pellston, Petoskey robotics teams headed to state championship

EMMET COUNTY — Northern Michigan teams will be represented during the FIRST Tech Challenge's (FTC) Michigan State Championship Northwest.

Both Petoskey and Pellston's middle school teams are headed to the competition after finding success in the recent qualifying competition in Pellston.

Pellston’s team, Artificial Intelligence, won the competition after being selected by the top alliance team captain.

Petoskey Middle School’s teams operate under the same name G3: Geeks, Gears and Gadgets. The team is split into two groups, green and blue. The green team qualified for states after winning the first place “Think Award.” The blue team won second place in the same award but did not qualify for the state competition. Both teams make their own robots and projects all together, but all 13 students will be traveling to the state championship downstate.

FTC is run by FIRST, a robotics community that creates team-based robotics games and challenges for students from preschool to high school. Each year, the game changes and comes with a new set of challenges for students to work through. This year’s FTC game is “CENTERSTAGE” and includes game elements like a bar to hang from at the end of the match and paper airplane “drones.”

The win was special for Pellston, said robotics mentor and member of the Pellston school board Rob Thomson. With a team made up of only three students, they worked hard to be able to design, build and program the robot. The team was also the first in Pellston Robotics history — including the high school team — to bring home a competition win.

“This was kind of a surprise for us. We weren't expecting anything like this,” he said. “It was good for the program. It's good for the kids. It's a great experience to get to see a lot of robots and a lot of stuff that you won't see in Northern Michigan, typically.”

Trying to get the team ready for competition presented its own set of struggles for the small team, said team driver and eighth grader Kaleb Price.

“Since we had a small team, it was kind of hard to actually get worked on efficiently, but we still made it work," he said.

Price, along with the other student driver Jace Kerr, agreed that the team’s size left them with problems like scrambling to tie up any loose ends and finishing things they didn’t have time to get to during practice.

Before heading into the final matches, the alliance team captain told them what they needed the robot to be able to do before their final matches. Price changed the robot’s code to allow the robot to successfully change what the robot did during the autonomous period of the match.

“It's cool that a kid can just step up and make it happen,” Thomson said. "He was able to make the changes quickly and it worked out flawlessly.”

FTC has more than just robots. Teams also have portfolios and boards set up explaining their outreach, how their teams run and more. While both of the Petoskey robots performed well, their portfolio seemed to be what sealed the deal for their ticket to states.

The Think Award is granted to teams that “best reflects the journey the team took as they experienced the engineering design process during the build season. The engineering content within the portfolio is the key reference for judges to help identify the most deserving team,” according to the FTC Awards Descriptions page.

Eli Kennedy, a seventh grader on the green team, said he primarily focused on the media work, helping to create the portfolio and board. He said hearing the team's name called wasn’t something they expected, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Subscribe: Get unlimited access to our local coverage

Willem Burris, an eighth grader on the green team in his second year in robotics, said he didn’t know the Think Award would send the team straight to states, but he was excited to hear the team’s name called — twice.

“Blue team got second, which was announced before green team getting first, so I was already surprised and happy for blue team having won an award and I was just more excited when we won first,” Burris said. “I'm really excited to go to states this year. I was on the green team last year and blue team went to states, so I'm really excited to be able to compete with the actual team.”

The Northwest FIRST Tech Challenge will take place Dec. 15-17 at Parker Middle School in Howell.

The Harbor Springs Middle School robotics team, Metal Makers, also participated in the Pellston competition. The team won the Design Award and Second Place Innovate Award. Neither award granted the team a qualification for the state competition in Howell.

— Contact reporter Karly Graham at kgraham@petoskeynews.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KarlyGrahamJRN.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Pellston, Petoskey FTC robotics teams headed to state championship