Three students from Hazelwood West High School and one from Hazelwood West Middle School allied themselves to a winning team during the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Tech Challenge robotics regional competition, where they received the Winning Alliance Award.
Called the Shrapnel Sergeants – Team 2408, the four-member team consisted of William Iwasko, team captain, Alex Hoeft, programmer, Sean Christie, mechanic and Justin Franz, safety, said Cory Cook, the team’s robotics coach and a science teacher at Hazelwood West High.
“We felt really good we won an award and we were really happy we were picked [for an alliance],” said Franz, who is an eighth grade student at Hazelwood West Middle School.
“All four students showed team spirit and worked well together. Our team fared very well at the beginning despite developing problems with motors and a bent shaft,” Cook said as he worked on the unit, named Junkyard.
“We are in the finals,” Franz announced to his teammates as soon as the scores were posted that afternoon. “We had to change the gear ratio because the robot was geared too high,” he explained as the other three students crowded around Cook and Junkyard in the student pit area. “We had three motors burn out but we fixed them with simple parts.”
Franz said for the final matches, Junkyard played a defensive-only role. “In the end, we didn’t even load balls into it; we just blocked other robots on the field.”
At one point, a team from a high school in the Rockwood School District stopped at the Sergeants’ table to ask questions about Junkyard and they briefly picked it up to guess how much it weighed. One of the tenets of this and other FIRST competitions is for the students to learn and practice Gracious Professionalism™. The judges and other officials note teams who not only help their teammates but assist those on other squads when they run into problems, which happens often.
Hazelwood Central High School fielded four robotics teams, one of which, the Beastie Bots - Team 291, placed 13th out of 34 teams prior to alliance selection.
“We had problems with some of the robots not working,” said Mike Quigley, Hazelwood Central’s robotics coach and a math teacher. “I chalked it up to a learning experience for the students. We have a lot of new kids who came away with what they need to do to prepare for a robotics competition.”
Quigley said preparation skills and time management are areas in which the Robohawks need practice.
“Even though they were disappointed not to ally with other teams, I think they learned about other cool robots that are out there,” he said.
Held at St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley, this year’s challenge was called “Hot Shot!” The object was to release, gather and shoot plastic wiffle balls into goals both on and off-field. Playing on two 12-foot square “fields,” 34 schools competed during qualifying rounds.
Next came the alliance selection. The top four qualifying teams each chose two other teams with which to ally. One of these teams chose to ally itself with the Shrapnel Sergeants. Allied teams, one red and one blue, competed in the semi-finals and finals. Each round is two minutes, 30 seconds long. The first 30 seconds is an autonomous period where the robots execute their programming, or in this case, move to release the balls, which were stored in vertical PVC pipes at the corners of the fields. The rest of the round featured student drivers piloting the units via hand-held controllers as they tried to gather the balls and shoot them into the goals while preventing their opponents from doing the same.
Cook and Quigley said their respective teams will compete at the FTC Southeast Missouri State University Regional robotics competition in Cape Girardeau in February. All three District high schools have teams registered to participate in March at the FIRST St. Louis Regional robotics competition at Saint Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena with different robots.