Bath High School Students are preparing for First Tech Robotics Competition
STEM is moving ahead at Bath County Highschool. STEM is Science Technology Engineering and Math. As part of this, a robotics team at Bath County High School is preparing for The First Tech Challenge, a high school robotics competition.
Ed Ozuls is the Engineering and Technology Education teacher at the high school.
“The students have taken robot parts, a kit that we purchased, and they’ve used that to build our design of a robot that’s supposed to meet the criteria from First Challenge,” says Ozols. “The robot is going to have to go up and down ramps, to put balls in circular goals, and then at the end, to put the goals at different locations in the playing field. The first part of the contest is going to be autonomous, meaning the robot has to be able to direct itself, without any input from anybody.”
Emmanuel is a member of the robotics team.
“I always grew up with computers, liking computers, and when I heard about this I just joined it,” says Emmanuel. “We meet Thursdays after school for 2 hours.”
Emmanuel has learned new types of languages while working on programming of the robot.
“Programming at times can be difficult” says Emmanuel. “We’ve been working together on everything. I’m pretty confident. It’s looking good.”
Noah is also a member of the robotics team, and has found that programming the robot was particularly challenging.
“We have to program the tasks in there” says Noah. “So like, if there’s an object out there, you have to say, ‘Go so many feet, turn, go another so many feet, do another task. We hooked up a controller to it, so if you press a button it’ll do a command like lift up an arm or grab on to an object if we need it to, and just drive it around.”
The robotics competition is the first ever for these students. It’s January 31st in Orange County. The students will be facing about 40 other teams.
Story By
