Robotics team from Northern Middle to test mettle at World Championship

Apr. 5—Sci-fi icon Isaac Asimov famously wrote about the Three Laws of Robotics, but perhaps there should be a fourth: Keep an eye on Pulaski County.

Two different local schools are sending teams to the 2024 VEX Robotics World Championship to be held in Dallas, Texas soon. Burnside Elementary School earned their place there by winning in the state-level robotics competition, and now Northern Middle School has also claimed a spot in their respective field.

The team — one of several from Northern Middle, this one named 650C (named after the school's address and the word "Captains") — will compete April 27-30 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas against other students from around the nation and the globe itself.

This is Northern Middle's second straight trip to the World Championships, after starting the program back up after the Covid disruption

"We did not win the state tournament, but we finished strong enough that there was an open bid," said coach Reece Turner. "... We're scrambling, but we're going to accept it."

Turner said that they found out they had the bid on March 25, making it a late-arriving opportunity that came right before Spring Break, putting them in a hurry-up mode to prepare and raise money for the trip — but at least Turner has plenty of experience in getting a team ready to go to Worlds.

"We had had a very successful program; we had (attended Worlds) one time prior, before Covid, in 2018," he said. "... (We) were basically starting all over, re-building a program from scratch."

But building from scratch is what robotics teams do best, putting together their own semi-autonomous robot with available parts and programming it, with students doing all that work on their own.

The Northern Middle team meets two days after school per week and some on the weekends. Students learn about electronics, programming, mechanical systems, animation, 3D CAD, computer-aided machining, web design, and materials fabrication.

Every year, VEX Robotics students are given to a different design theme. This year, the robots participate in a game called "Over Under" and are trying to pick up "cubic triangles" or what Turner calls "green acorns." The robots manipulate those units, working together where one throws the "acorns" to the other side of a divider bar, and the other stuffs it in a net to earn points. Meanwhile, the opponent's robots are on the same field, trying to accomplish the same task.

Turner teaches Pre-Engineering at Northern Middle with the Project Lead the Way program, an initiative between Pulaski County Schools and a STEM education-focused non-profit organization.

He said he has an "outstanding group" that has had "strong finishes across the board." The team going on to the Worlds in particular had a "really dynamic design" to their robot, winning Design and Judges' awards, and Turner believes that played a key role in getting the opportunity to compete on the world stage.

In particular, he pointed to seventh-grader Leah Chenault, who made it to the quarterfinals of the middle school state competition and was noticed for her outstanding robot design.

"Last year, she was not even part of the team," said Turner. "While I had solid group of builders and stuff (last year), they really were not that up to speed as far as programming. ... We knew that we needed somebody, if we got down there and had to troubleshoot the robot, and I could not be involved (not being a student). We added Leah to the team and she went with us as just a troubleshooter. This year, she absolutely just tore it up and designed her own robot and programmed it, and she's done exceedingly well."

Their finish at Worlds last year was in the "middle of the pack," but Turner "did not think that was too terrible," he said, noting that the division they were in was the highest offense scoring division there.

"If you stack this up to the lesser point-scoring divisions, we would have probably finished higher than what we did in our division," he said. "I was tickled to death with a group of brand-new students just starting over, didn't really know anything about the process, didn't know anything about the program. (It was) their first time going through a design challenge; a lot of them, the first time they'd really gotten to anything like this. To win a tournament (as they did last year) was pretty outstanding and then to be selected to go to Worlds and actually finish quite well (was too)."

This year, Turner believes his team has a better robot with which to compete, which could help his team finish even better at Worlds.

Along with Chenault, eighth-grader Wyatt Gastineau and seventh-grader Avery Gundaker will be attending the World Championship on the Northern Middle Team. Turner said Chenault and Gundaker have been the "main two" driving the team this year, and Gastineau was added because his strong design and building acumen; "He has really just taken to this like a duck to water," said Turner. "So they asked him to join them to go with them, and I was tickled to death that they would do that."

The team is trying to raise money for their trip to Dallas. For that purpose, a GoFundMe account has been established at www.gofundme.com/f/2024-northern-middle-school-international-robotics-trip, titled "2024 Northern Middle School International Robotics Trip." As of Friday afternoon, $1,485 had been raised toward a $15,000 goal.