Rochester Public Schools' robotics team heads to the world competition for first time since 2015

Apr. 16—ROCHESTER — A flurry of activity was bouncing around a workshop in the basement of Kellogg Middle School on Wednesday evening. The smell of a metal grinder filled the air. The wailing of a drill rang out. Students and coaches debated measurements as if it were shop class, while others tinkered with lines of Java script on their laptops as if working at a Silicon Valley startup.

As disjointed as it may have seemed at first glance, the hodgepodge of activity all whirled around a single point like a hurricane. And at the eye of that storm stood a single robot affectionately named "Riffs of Insanity."

For Rochester Public Schools, that robot is the ticket to the world competition in Houston, Texas from April 17-20. It will be the first time the team has reached that level since 2015, and only the second time since the team began competing 17 years ago.

The mere fact that Rochester has earned a spot is a considerable feat. It's the result of a team that has become highly organized and focused — not just on reaching the world competition, but also on what they can take away from the experience and how it will propel them even further in life.

The team's coaches, Tim Alexander and Amanda Ebright, tore themselves away from the workshop on Tuesday, April 9, to speak about the accomplishment with the Rochester School Board. But, it was a presentation they had to give alone.

"I couldn't get any of the students to leave the shop tonight," Alexander said during the meeting. "They're all elbow deep in robot right now."

At the start of robotics season, all the teams receive a series of instructions for what tasks their robots have to be able to accomplish. From there, the race is on. The students divide themselves into various subgroups and work out different design concepts. They then come back together and discuss their ideas — critiquing them, honing them.

Once the team decides what the robot's design will be, they divvy up the work once again. There's students in charge of computer-aided design, students in charge of electronics, students in charge of graphics, and so on.

"Even if you're not interested in engineering, you still learn a lot of important skills in robotics that can help you in many different areas of your life," said Clarissa Peterson, a Century High School senior, "no matter what career you choose to go into."

In spite of that compartmentalization, the teams are highly integrated, helping students merge their part of the project with the overall goal.

And then the games begin. From the time the playbook drops, they have six weeks to get ready for the season's first scrimmage during what they call "week zero." This year, teams score points by using their robots to pick up foam rings and then either dump them in deposited areas or shooting them into goals.

"Every year, the way the field looks and the targets and the goals and the manipulatable items are totally different," Ebright said. "There's a huge amount of strategy in this game. It's very different from past years."

Rochester has had a very successful season so far. They were the No. 1 seed out of 62 teams and went on to win the 10,000 Lakes Regional Competition in Minneapolis.

The matches take form in two phases. There's an autonomous phase when the robot has to drive itself. The second phase is when a group of students have to drive the robot by remote control.

The world of robotics is highly strategic. Although they're all competing, different teams build alliances with one another. That dynamic of the game has engendered the concept of "coopertition" — essentially forcing teams to be able to work together in the midst of a competitive playing field.

And the matches get rough. Even though teams are trying to score points of their own, defense is a huge part of the game. And when 200-pound-plus robots are ramming into each other at 30 mph, things tend to break.

Because of that, the students weren't actually building their robot Wednesday night — they were repairing it. It's taken a bit of a beating so far.

But no matter how much they repair their robot in the leadup to the world competition, they know they're going to have to repair it again in real time during the actual competition matches. Students described it as being comparable to NASCAR, where they may need to pull their robot off to a "pit" to repair it during the competition itself.

That's why the matches become an all-hands-on-deck environment, even though only a handful of the team's students are a part of the actual drive team.

"Not only are we busy when we're working on the robot," said Mayo High School Junior James Hanstedt. "When we're at that competition, everyone has a job — everyone's helping out."

All teams competing in robotics are assigned a number. The Rochester team's official name is "Team 2530 Inconceivable." Like the name "Riffs of Insanity" they gave to their robot, it's a long-standing reference to the group's love for the movie "The Princess Bride."

Unlike many other extracurricular activities in Rochester Public Schools, the robotics team is a cross section of the district's schools and grades. Students who wouldn't necessarily have any other overlapping connection come together to build a robot.

Their track record this year is a first for the team, even considering the fact that they went to the world competition once before. In 2015, Rochester went to the world competition not because it earned a spot, but because of an alliance they had with another team, who selected Rochester to come along.

This year, however, the team is headed to Houston based on the strength of its own creation, a testament to quality of their shared effort.

Now the president of the Rochester Public Schools' teachers union, Vince Wagner formerly helped lead the robotics team for years. With that historical perspective, he's been impressed with what he's seen this year.

"It's probably the best robot they've ever built," Wagner said. "There's been a couple other years where we've had really good robots, but this robot is exceptional."

The students know that's not something that just happened out of mere chance. This past summer, they made an intentional effort to become more strategic, providing more training for new students coming into the program.

They also started doing more reviews of their performance after the fact, trying to hone in on what areas they needed to improve on for whenever their robot would hit the competition floor again.

They've even made investments in new equipment. The team didn't have the thousands of dollars necessary to buy a CNC router, so they bought a kit and built one. That's allowed them to make their robot with a lot more precision.

It's been a learning experience, even for the adults in the room. Brian Bartholmai is one of the mentors for the team and a parent of one of the students on it.

"I'm a doctor — I don't know how to do this, but we figured it out," Bartholmai said. "Honestly, this is all a learning experience."

At one point while everyone in the workshop was working on half a dozen different projects associated with their robot, Century High School senior Tanisha Lahiri walked into the main room to make an announcement: The team had crossed the threshold of $40,000. They were well on their way to paying their way to the World competition.

The team receives some funding from the school district, but the students end up doing a lot of the fundraising themselves. Once they learned they had earned a spot in Houston, they realized they had to find a way to raise thousands of dollars in a short window of time.

They've been doing some of that fundraising through the online platform 4giving. As of Saturday, April 13, that page had raised just over $16,000 through that platform, which was accompanied by a comment stream full of well-wishers cheering the team on.

Most of the students were wearing their team's bright green shirt as they worked in the basement of Kellogg. On the back of those shirts was a list of sponsors supporting the program.

Fundraising for the team is ultimately just one of the components woven into the larger effort of getting their robot up and running. They've written grants. They've made pitches to businesses. They know that if they want to compete at the World level, they have to be the ones making it happen.

They've even taken their case to the powers that be at the Minnesota capitol building. On Thursday, April 11, the students Peterson and Lahiri headed up to St. Paul to speak with lawmakers at the event "Robots in the Rotunda."

"We want to talk to them about our team and how much it's impacted us personally as students," Lahiri said. "I feel like this program's really important to have in Rochester. You gain a lot of valuable skills, and I want to show that to our representatives."