Adam Robison | Buy at photos.djournal.com Gabe Carter, Race Davis and Ethan Young, members of the Tupelo Middle School Robotics Build Team, look over examples on the computer to gather ideas as they work on their robot Slim Wavey in Judy Hardens class Monday afternoon. The team qualified for the first Robotics State Competition on March 4 at Ole Miss. They will compete against mostly high school teams. If they win, they will go to the national competition.

By Emma Crawford Kent

Daily Journal

TUPELO The Tupelo Middle School robotics team is gearing up for a competition against students from across the state of Mississippi, many of whom are in high school.

The team, the Tupelo Wavebots, will compete at the FIRST Tech Challenge state robotics competition on Saturday in Oxford against 23 other teams.

Judy Harden, robotics teacher and coach, said the team of seventh- and eighth-grade students usually competes against mostly high school robotics teams.

Thats a big deal, Harden said.

This is the first year the team has competed at the state level, and if they do well, they could qualify to compete at the national level, too.

The team began during the 2015-16 school year as an after-school club, but Harden said the students didnt compete much.

Adam Robison | Buy at photos.djournal.com Ethan Young, a member of the Tupelo Middle School Robotics Build Team, measures from the wheel to make sure they are working within the required 18 inch cube space for the competition on their robot Slim Wavey.

Now, TMS offers the class as an elective, and the team is made up of students in the class. They work on their projects during class and after school on some days.

The class is split up into teams that each focus on a different competition element art, programming, marketing, recording data and building.

At competitions, all of these moving parts come together. The teams robot battles against other robots, performing certain tasks given to the students ahead of time so they can program the robots to do them.

The students must also make a presentation of the work theyve done prior to the competition, including recorded data, how they programmed the robot and other details.

Daven Sanders, a seventh-grader, helps program the robot, developing skills he says will help him out in the future.

It helps me for what I want to be when I grow up, which is an engineer or an architect building things and making things move and designing things which is basically what I do in this class, Sanders said.

The presentation also includes a marketing component in which students must pitch their robot as a product.

They get to use these skills in real-life situations, Harden said.

In Hardens classroom on Monday, Race Davis busied himself trying to make improvements to the teams robot.

Davis said he is confident, but not overconfident, about the teams chances in this weekends competition.

I know that were not going to do terribly, Davis said, with a laugh.

Although the team could qualify for the national competition this weekend, Davis said hes trying not to think too far ahead.

Were just trying to get past state at this point, Davis said.

emma.crawford@journalinc.com

Twitter: @emcrawfordkent

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TMS robotics team headed to state - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal