Thatcher middle school robotics team wins NASA-sponsored trip to Florida

When Jason Hansen, 13, found out his middle school robotics team had won a NASA-sponsored trip to Florida, he was in disbelief. "A little small robotics team from Thatcher?" he recalled thinking. "Nope, that's not us."

In Arizona's Graham County, Thatcher Middle School tends to dominate in sports, according to math and robotics teacher Chris Carrell. "You see a lot of money and a lot of interest go into programs like that," he said.

But last spring, his robotics team won a trip to Florida after participating in a national robotics competition. Since then, Carrell has seen a surge of interest in robotics programs, not just in the Thatcher Unified School District but in neighboring districts as well.

Robotics fell into Carrell's lap five years ago, he said, when his son asked him to build a "BattleBot" inspired by the robot combat television show, BattleBots.

From a 99-cent plastic Halloween pumpkin, a $5 remote-controlled car, zip ties, a motor and a 3-D printed wheel, Carrell created a "BattleBot" for his then 4-year-old son. He drove it around the school office one day to mess with his colleagues, and the next day, Thatcher Middle School's principal told him the school was going to start a robotics program, and they had chosen him to lead it.

Now, enrollment in Carrell's class has jumped, and he's mentoring new robotics teams in the nearby Safford Unified and Pima Unified school districts, he said. He's also sharing his wisdom with robotics coaches across the state — he recently gave a lecture at Arizona State University on how to teach kids to program robots.

His team won a NASA-sponsored trip to Florida this summer after competing at Northern Arizona University's Lunar Legacy Invitational in May. On the trip, the students visited the Kennedy Space Center and went on tours of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building and its two main launch pads, he said.

They also watched a SpaceX rocket launch.

"It was cool watching everything that we learned, the thrust, lift, drive, stage one, two, three, all burning up and coming apart, watching each mechanism all come together was exciting," said Jackson Mullenaux, 13.

The Lunar Legacy Invitational was part of the national Artemis ROADS challenge, funded by NASA and inspired by NASA's Artemis missions on the moon.

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For the competition, students had to devise a closed-loop system to grow plants and produce food for a long-term stay on the moon, fly a drone along the path of the Artemis rocket and program a robot to enter and exit craters and collect soil samples, among other tasks, Carrell said.

"Kids are naturally scientists and engineers," said Anne Hamlin, a research associate and the robotics education program director at NAU. "When you frame it in a way that makes it possible for them ... and makes it engaging and entertaining and inspiring and fun, they excel."

During a section of the competition when the students had to program robots to climb a steep slope, Milan Millar, 13, said he "loved playing with the gears to get it in four-wheel drive and also seeing how it affected it if you made the wheels bigger, made the robot heavier."

Leo Simpson, 13, said he enjoyed seeing everyone's designs when they were asked to launch DIY rockets, and Nicholas Lee, 13, liked how they were able to work together as a team to accomplish an egg-drop challenge with limited resources.

Carrell said the school's robotics program, which he considers a sport, is a way for students to "express themselves and show off what they can do." And in today's job market, "being able to code and program and build and adapt and innovate and iterate, all of these skills are hugely important," he said.

Most importantly, he hopes to impart problem-solving skills to his students. Over the past four years, his robotics program has worked to get handicap-accessible playground equipment installed in nearby playgrounds, automated external defibrillators (AEDs) placed in schools and parks and a pickleball court installed in a local park.

"All of those ideas were inspired by my robotics team meeting up with experts and city engineers trying to make a difference in the community," Carrell said.

"Being a part of the robotics team is .... a lot of talking, communicating, finding out what will work, what doesn’t, trial and error," Jackson said. "It takes years and months of just practices to get things right that seem and look simple, but the work behind it is extremely complicated."

Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @maddieparrish61.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Middle school robotics team wins NASA-sponsored trip to Florida