Saturday, December 10th the Brownwood Intermediate School is sending 4 robotics teams to San Angelo for the TCEA Area Robotics Competition. The contest will be the last one before the state competition in spring and will put the robots and their programming to a test of “nuclear” proportions.
This year the competitions have a Chernobyl theme. The robots, created from Lego Mindstorms kits, are built, customized and then programmed by the students to perform simulated nuclear cleanup operations. The 4’x4’ competition field has a large circle printed on it that symbolizes a cooling chamber. Within the circle are red and black checkers representing two different types of materials that need to be “quarantined” by the robots. The red checkers symbolize hazardous radioactive materials and the black are depleted nuclear waste and each must be moved to the correct designated areas on the field. “This particular challenge is really tough this year because the robots have to move all the checkers to where they are supposed to be, but we won’t know what order they will be in until we get there and it could be different every round,” said Christine Moore, teacher and team sponsor.
Each team has three or four students that have been practicing and fine-tuning their robots during practice two times a week.
“This is the first year that Kohler engineers have been working with students to help them test and program the robots,” Moore said. “They come up here and provide help for the kids through the process. They’ve been great.”
The students will leave Saturday morning around 6:30 a.m. and get there around 8:30 a.m. where they will have around two hours to go over any last-minute adjustments before they compete.
“The competitions get more difficult and more strict as you go,” Moore said. “Nobody is allowed into the competition area except the students, not even the teachers or parents. They have somebody who monitors them, but the students have to handle any problems that come up on their own.”
The top 3 teams are guaranteed a spot at state, and if a team ranks in the top 10 it is likely they will be selected to compete at the state level. Brownwood Intermediate School had robotics teams rank 10th, 17th, 25th, 45th, 46th, and 48th out of around 70 in the region invitational on November 7th. The contest on Saturday will determine if they move on to the state competition for a third year.
