Zanesville students off to conquer Worlds robotic competition
ZANESVILLE − Zanesville City Schools continues its run of success in the VEX Robotics competition, sending three teams to the world tournament in Dallas this year. A team from Zanesville High School will compete on April 25-27. Two teams from John McIntire Elementary School are heading to Dallas for the elementary school VEX IQ competition on May 2-4.
This year's high school competition is called Spin Up. Robots shoot 5 1/2 inch wide foam discs into a raised baskets for 5 points for each disc. They can move them into an area under the basket for 1 point. There are four rollers on each side of the square arena the teams compete in, spinning those to their team's color will garner 10 points. At the end of the match, robots get three points for each tile their robot covers. That means robots can expand in size and the ZHS robot shoots six strings to cover as many tiles as they can.
The elementary school competition is called Slapshot. The robots spin a wheel to dispense small discs, then shoot the discs under a bar to the opposite half of the field. Each region of the field is worth a different amount of points. The robots can expand over the bar at the end of the match to score additional points.
The competitions are cooperative. Each team is paired with another random team to compete against another pair of teams. The duo that scores the most points wins. The winners of each of the divisions at Worlds will advance to the final competition. More than 3,000 teams across the elementary, middle and high school competitions qualified.
Dhruv Patel has qualified for the Worlds in elementary school, middle school and high school. The robotics room at Zanesville High School has dozens of awards from state and regional competitions, but there are few from the worlds. Patel, a sophomore, would like to change that.
"It gives us another opportunity to win something because we haven't brought anything back since we have gone. So we have really been trying to bring something back, to actually win," he said.
Rick Mohler has been the robotics coach at ZHS for seven years. This will be his sixth trip to the Worlds. "Every year it gets more and more difficult," he said. "The competition in Ohio is just through the roof. So if you can qualify for Worlds from Ohio, you are a threat to actually win.
"When you are able to take our students in rural Southeast Ohio and compete with the super large teams from up north near Cleveland, and now down near Cincinnati, for us to be able to compete on the same stages as those teams and also compare favorably to teams from around the world, it says a lot about our area and the quality of students and the education they have here." Mohler said each team that has gone to Worlds has finished with a winning percentage of .500 or better during qualifying rounds.
"It is an unbelievable opportunity that I am not sure the kids fully understand," said Jonathan Cranz, a volunteer coach with the John McIntire Elementary School teams. "Teams from all over the world are coming from all over the world to Dallas to compete."
Students at all levels of the competition build, program and drive the robots themselves, even at the elementary level. There are also other aspects of the competition that can earn a team a trip to the Worlds, including an engineering notebook. That is how John McIntire Elementary's Cola Killers team punched their ticket, by winning the Innovate Award at the Ohio state competition. The other McIntire team, the Legendary Pickles, won the state skills competition. The skills competition is a combination of programmed autonomous driving and driver-controlled operation of the robot. The skills competition is how the Zanesville High School team qualified as well.
Stacey Mohler is in her final season as robotics coach at McIntire. Her first team, an all-girl team who are now seniors, qualified for worlds as six graders. Apart from learning basic engineering and programming, students also learn teamwork and communication, she said.
As students progress, the robots, and the engineering involved, becomes more complicated. "The robotics program teaches students about the engineering process," Mohler said. "The perseverance it takes to be an engineer and the fact that you have to be willing, and almost looking forward to failing as part of the process. Having an idea, building, programming, testing, revising, building and testing again, it really shows students that your path to a goal is not just a straight line. You have to be willing to work and able to fail, and try and never give up."
The Zanesville High School team consists of Patel, Karter Bludnick, Caiden Balsley, Chloe Buchanan and Steven Morrison. The McIntire Legendary Pickles team consists of Owen Cranz, Cooper Matthews and Emmett Martin. Team members for the Cola Killers are Caitlin Montgomery, Michael Emmert III and Damon Burkett.
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This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: Zanesville students off to conquer Worlds robotic competition
