By Darcy Meadedarcy.meade@sentinel-standard.com

BELDING Belding High School and its robotics program played host to nearly 50 teams for its Vex Robotics Competition.

Saturday, teams from schools like Pewamo-Westphalia, Hudsonville, Grandville and Petoskey among others descended into Redskin Arena to qualify for state competition. Two teams from Grandville and one from Hudsonville earned the honors to compete on the state level.

Fourteen of the 49 teams were from two Ionia County school districts. Belding had four middle school teams and eight high school teams and Pewamo-Westphalia had two high school teams. The Belding High School teams took eight, ninth, 13th, 16th, 40th, 41st, 42nd and 47th. The middle schoolers picked up 30th, 43rd, 45th and 47th, while P-W came in at 26th and 36th.

"It was tough, but it was definitely better than past years," P-W freshman Alexis Celis said.

The competition started out with 62 qualifying matches, which puts two teams of two robots into the arena and the more points a robot receives the higher they qualify. The match had two objectives, one of which happens with the push of a button, called autonomous.

"With autonomous they have to program the robot to work on its own for 15 seconds and try to score as many points as it can and it can be kind of complicated ... so they need to learn the programming language and make the robot go on its own," STMBotix teacher and robotics coach Doug Klein said.

The next is a round that is nearly two minutes long, where the robots go head-to-head to see who can get the most points. Teams have to push star objects, which are worth one point, and cubes, which are worth two, to the opponents side. Klein said based on how many wins a team has is how they are seeded for the tournament.

Four Belding High School teams and one P-W team made it into tournament play. Klein said his second team had some trouble early on.

"Their robot had problems, the arm lifting mechanism broke, so they got disabled a few matches in," Klein said. "It can be frustrating because stuff goes wrong ... sometimes something goes wrong and you have time to fix it and sometimes it's just like you have to work with what you've got."

The program at P-W is funded through different fundraisers and the club said they have received donations from the P-W Boosters, PFCU, Consumers Energy and P-W Students Take Charge. The club plans to visit local businesses in hopes of becoming sponsored. Klein said the costs add up between registering, t-shirts and getting new part, it can be costly.

When asked why the students decided to join the robotics club, they all said because they had fun in the STMBotix class. Some said they even plan to go into the engineering field.

"I'm thinking about mechanical engineering because my dad is a mechanical engineer, so a lot of the things I know I learned from him," P-W Senior Adrian Celis said. "When we took the robot home he would talk to us about what makes sense here and what doesn't and he knew that we would eventually have the problem with the gears having too much torque on them."

This was the last competition of the year for P-W, but will start back up building another couple of robots in May after the world championship because that is when the new game will be released.

For more information on the robotics club or to donate, email Klein at klein@pwschools.org.

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Belding hosts robotics competition - Sentinel-Standard