HHS Robotics: Challenges and Success
Competitive robotics teams at HHS started to practice in early August. There are four high school robotics teams and an additional middle school team that compete in VEX Robotics. The head coach, Chris Stewart, conveys his goals for the season: “My mission is always to build excitement about STEM career fields through the use of competitive robotics.”This year’s competition consists of depositing balls in cylindrical goals to score and descoring the opposing team’s balls; at tournaments teams compete in a two versus two setup.
Practices usually consist of teams building, programming, and documenting what they did in an engineering notebook. Engineering a robot is where teamwork is most important since students must work together to build different mechanisms that will be assembled on the robot. Andrew Snyder, the team captain of the Junior-Senior team, explains, “Sometimes team members design two mechanisms that are intended to function alongside each other but instead have incompatibility issues and lead to reduced functionality.”Likewise, communication between teammates is very important to make a functional robot.
Like most activities or sports, Covid-19 has largely affected robotics. Coach Stewart says, “We had to limit growth and focus on spreading teams out so that we are not overlapping practice times.” Teams are limited with the amount of time they are able to build and program their robot. This has presented a unique challenge, as they have less time than past years.
Tiger Robotics attended a recent tournament in Mitchell, SD,which went very well for the group. The Sophomore team earned tournament champion, Excellence Award, and Skills Award. The Junior-Senior team was a tournament finalist and earned the Judges Award. One of the Freshmen teams also earned a Sportsmanship Award. Harrisburg took home six of the overall nine awards at the competition. All of the Harrisburg Robotics teams qualified for State and the Sophomore team qualified for Nationals. Although most of the Harrisburg teams performed proficiently, they will continue to improve their robots for upcoming tournament. They plan to host a tournament on December 12th at HSMS.