For their first competition in school history, the A.L. Brown robotics team hit the high seas and took top honors.

Six students teamed together to create a daring nautical map for their pirate ship robot to navigate, braving turbulent waters, escaping a whirl pool and battling enemies along the way.

Though the project took weeks of preparationand a six-hour cram session the Saturday beforethe effort paid off in a first-place victory at the statewide N.C. Beta Club Robotics Team competition with the opportunity now to compete at nationals.

This is the very first year Beta Club has had this competition at convention, Robotics Club advisor and A.L. Brown science and engineering teacher Jason Stegall said. This will be a were learning as we go. We had a small taste at the state level, and the national level will be same rules, same guidelines, but obviously the competition gets a lot stiffer. So well have to have a better understanding of what our true goals are for moving, shaking, creatingwhich is so wide open.

N.C. Beta Club holds a statewide convention each year with a host of competitions, and this year the group added a robotics component. Eight schools, including A.L. Brown, signed up. And this particular contest took a bit of a different approach.

In a lot of competitions, it is a scoring of how many balls you can put in the hoop, how quickly can you move this to there, Stegall said. This one was purely a theme. Make a robot that is autonomous, which means theres no remote controlit is sensor driven, that can demonstrate moving, shaking, creating. That was the entire competition that you were trying to fulfill.

Teams earned points for how well they worked together, whether the robot was truly autonomous, and how it demonstrated the moving and shaking and creating aspects.

And, of course, each team had to devise a theme.

The Wonders in the end settled on pirates, though it was not the first idea the team tried.

We got started, and we had to just scrap it and start again, which again is one of the reasons you do these things, Stegall said. You realize that not all things worth doing are as simple as we do it this way and it all works. We let them know, yeah, a lot of times you fail at your first attempts, or you realize you need to make drastic changes and move on. They learned that quite well.

As part of the competition, each team could bring a floor for their robot, since the devices tend to behave differently on different surfaces. The A.L. Brown groupself-dubbed The Seven Seasran with the pirate theme and decided to create a giant nautical map, complete with a compass, sea monsters, islands, coastlines and an enemy fort.

The robot, a pirate ship, was programmed to follow a line, so the map created a path for it to follow through rough waterswith raised patches to simulate rockingand into a whirl pool, where a different sensor told the ship to twirl.

When it came upon another ship, the robot knew to fire, or play recorded sounds of cannons, and when it came upon a fort, it turned to aim at the structure.

It would continue on the path and would come onto a fort, and again it would fire on the fortification, but for that it had to make a different turn, so we could represent when it sees this, a different sensor, Stegall said. So instead of following a line and seeing whats on the floor, this sensor can read distance to objects in front, so it read that the fort was in front and would stop and turn and fire. So it gave us another way to demonstrate our robot as autonomous and using its sensors.

And all of the work, the teacher said, came in the weeks and months leading up to the competition, fine tuning the project and working together to get things done.

Getting the students to work as a big group, having them diligently and efficiently work, work as a team, that is what is actually all of the effort and all of the reason that you do these things, he said. Theyre learning things about robotics, but theyre also learning team and collaboration and being responsible. When someone says Im going to bring this tomorrow, and then they dont, that peer pressure makes them realize, oh, I do have to keep up with this.

The students themselves recognized the importance of this having gone through it once and said they were eager to apply at the next level.

I learned, I think, teamwork is a really excellent skill to have, Jesse Peterson said. I think it really helped us win states.

Communication is also crucial, the students said, and something they need to improve next time around.

I would say learn from your mistakes because it didnt go 100 percent the first time, and now we know how to fix everything and make it better, Jackson Holsclaw said. Im looking forward to working on it and doing a whole new project again and a new robot, change it up.

The Seven Seas have decided to brainstorm a different theme for the national competition, which will feature the top three winners from each state Beta Club conventionthat can make the tripand takes place June 29 at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. Stegall said if the school can raise the money, the team intends to go, and go to win.

We have every intent to place, so were not just going to Disney, he said. Were going to compete because it takes too much time. Theres no reason to take this much time and then not have the students focus on it.

The team has already begun, going back to the drawing board and trying to up the ante for what they anticipate to be a much more rigorous field.

Looking at what we did and thinking that the national competition will be much more competitive, I believe were going to do an entire overhaul of how were going about the competition, Stegall said. What we realized is once the students get to the point of its working, we have most of the props made, we have everything fully operational, there is still lots of time necessary to make it right. That is where we learned where time is truly valuable.

So we need to be at that point where everything is mostly working, we need to have time to finesse and fix, and that takes weeks. We need more time since were trying to do more for nationals.

See more here:

Wonders robotics takes 1st at state - Independent Tribune