Students gain a variety of skills in First Robotics By Ian Bek, 14, Will Guter, 13, Julien Malherbe, 13, Perry Mesloh, 11, Ian Parkkonen, 11 and Anja McBride, 9 Robotics, for most people, is only understandable by scientists who have studied the subject for years. Few people would believe that high school students in many schools across the Upper Peninsula could be building and programming large robots to complete complicated tasks. One such group at Marquette Senior High School is known as Team Cold Logic. This team is part of the state, national and international First Robotics Competition and has about twenty members. Team Cold Logic is one of hundreds of teams in Michigan, including many other high schools in the Upper Peninsula. The group meets with its coach and other mentors after school during the winter season to prepare its robot, known as “Bruce,” for the competition. “Bruce” is named for the shark in the animated film “Finding Nemo” and is designed to roll up and down a floor and throw a ball through a goal. That was the challenge for the teams in First Robotics this year. Each year, First Robotics teams everywhere have a different challenge that is announced at the start of a six-week period in which the teams build the robot and prepare for competition. Each member of the team has a specific job that allows him or her to hone some special skills. Team member Wesley Copeman, fifteen and a freshman, gets a lot out of being a part of the program. “Just getting to work with all the different people, getting to work on all the different aspects of the robot, building, assembling, planning, strategizing, and just going to competition and being able to sit back to cheer on your team and watch as you either win or you play your best and it’s just a lot of fun,” he said. First Robotics Competition was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. The program has about 32,000 teams and over 350,000 students across the nation working and building robots and building social connections at the same time. The different teams in the program have built an impressive 28,800 robots. Lindsey Cochran, seventeen and a junior, is a scout for Cold Logic. She scouts out other robots to see if they want join an alliance with that team. She said the program has helped her academically, but also with social interaction. “It has taught me a lot of science, technology and mathematical skills, but I’ve also learned a lot about business relations and social kinds of things so I can talk with more people and just learn how to interact and work together better with other people,” she said. Ewan Rafferty, fourteen and a freshman, is an aerial assist specialist on the team. The tasks change every year, but he explained more about what the robots needed to do in this year’s competition. “There’s two balls, a red and a blue ball and the blue and red lines are going against each other,” he explained. “There’s a truss and the robots have to throw the ball over the truss and either into the high or low goal.” Building and maneuvering the robot isn’t the only obstacle the team has to face. They also have to try hard to work together without arguments, which sometimes may be a challenge. “To do well, it really comes down to being able to work together as a team, to discuss and decide what you’re going to do, quickly and efficiently, and not getting hung up on drama that usually is associated with high school,” Copeman said. “You need to move on as a team and just keep working.” Creating robots though is not the only task the teams must do well on. They are also judged on their “gracious professionalism” or how they get along and help the other teams. John King, an industrial arts teacher at Marquette Senior High School, has served as one of mentors for Team Cold Logic for all four of the years it has existed. He gave an example of gracious professionalism. “Even though we’re out there competing against each other, we’re still there to help out,” he said. “If their robot breaks, we might be out there asking them, hey can we help? Is there anything that we can do? Do you need any new parts? Do you need any tools to get it back running?” King is impressed by what he has seen the team do every season. “It really shows a lot about our students and the amount of drive and desire they have to actually compete on a state level,” King said. “When we go downstate, we compete against teams that are sponsored by General Motors, we have teams that are sponsored by NASA, we have teams that sponsored by some of the biggest names in manufacturing and we go down there and we are kind of this little ragtag team. I think when we started we were one of only about seven teams in the Upper Peninsula doing robotics. Now that number has doubled.” First Robotics also has higher education scholarship programs for some of its participants around the world. These help future engineers, programmers, fundraisers, businesspersons advance in their future careers. King believes it is one of the only sports where everyone who participates has a chance to “go pro.” “When you take a look at hockey and basketball and you take a look at a lot of the major sports out there not everybody is going to but in First Robotics, everybody has a chance to ‘go pro,’” he said. “There are $19 million dollars in scholarships just for First Robotics participants. You don’t necessarily have to go into the engineering side…they look at the business side…they look at the art side of it. There are a lot of avenues that it could open up.” For more information about the First Robotics Competition, visit usfirst.org