Three years ago, this young man knocked on my office door and said, Hey, Mrs. Wallace, I want to build a robot that we can use to compete. How do you turn him away and say no, were not going to do that.
Therein lies the origin of the Uniontown Area High School robotics team, a small but determined group of students who, over the course of two school years, have thrived on a curiosity of technology.
The young man is Uniontown senior Noah Trimmer, who with classmate Andrew Schoener, got the robotics program up and running with the assistance of district education technology coordinator Mary Wallace at the start of the 2018-19 school year.
Ive done a lot of personal projects. I wanted to take them out of my garage and share them with my friends and have fun, said Trimmer.
While the high school offers as an elective an introduction to robotics course called Agile Robotics, which both Trimmer and Schoener took as underclassmen, the two students were more ambitious.
The class teaches the basics. We wanted to go beyond the basics, said Schoener. We wanted the freedom to build our own thing.
Seeking resources and direction, the new team affiliated with Fayette County 4-H, which operates a robotics club and provided Uniontown with materials for its first activities.
They went fundraising, securing grants from the Uniontown Area Education Association, Pitsco Education and Williams Inc.
And then they set to work on the main endeavor.
Like several other area schools that sponsor robotics teams, Uniontown entered the realm of competitive building. Unlike other schools, theyve opted to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge series of competitions operated by FIRST, an international youth robotics community that promotes team-based programs through competitive events.
The FIRST Tech Challenge is designed for teams of students to design, build and program a robot using a modular robotics platform powered by Android technology and to compete head-to-head in an alliance format against other teams in a FIRST-designed game.
Teams have to build a robot that will perform specific tasks, explained Schoener.
They received a kit of basic parts from FIRST and built a robot for a regional competition held at Upper St. Clair High School a year ago. While the result wasnt exceptional, the rookie team received the Judges Award for its perseverance despite a last-minute setback when much of the robots programming was accidentally deleted the night before the competition.
This year, the Raiders fared much better.
In a 26-team competition at Garrett College in nearby McHenry, Maryland, in January, the team was chosen by another competitor after the qualifying rounds to form an alliance that took them on a run to the finals, where they ultimately lost by mere points.
I think teams saw we had a really good robot but just had been really unlucky with pairings (with other teams in the qualifying rounds), said Trimmer, noting the many hours of work that has gone into programming the robot.
The team, which has consisted of up to 15 active members over the last two years, comprises a core that is rounded out by seniors Abigail Bellina and Luke Smearcheck.
Wallace commended the dedication of the four students Bellina, Schoener, Smearcheck and Trimmer who often spent upwards of four hours meeting on Monday nights during competition season to prepare their bot.
Academically theyre taking extremely hard courses. Theyre active in band, in clubs, playing sports theyre generally well rounded individuals, said Wallace.
Wallace said Jennifer Deichert, 4-H educator with Penn State Extension, was instrumental in the development of the high school robotics program. The school received a grant through Remake Learning to hold a camp in conjunction with 4-H last summer, during which the high schoolers taught basic robotics to students in grades 4-8.
There are many, many hours of dedication, and that knock on the door started us off.
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Uniontown robotics team programmed to succeed | Education - Uniontown Herald Standard
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