Crescent Valley robotics focused on developing freshmen – Corvallis Gazette Times

Last year marked the fourth straight year that Crescent Valley High Schools robotics team qualified for and traveled to the FIRST Robotics world championship.

That meant, of course, that the team had a group of experienced senior leaders who had traveled with the team to the world championship every year.

But it also meant that the team lost seven or eight seniors, mostly from the design and build teams, after last season, said Matthew Sundberg, this years captain and a CV senior who has been on the team since his freshman year.

Sundberg said that this year's team has just five seniors, and their experience is less concentrated in the design and build areas (some come from the business/fundraising/marketing side of the team).

Its been fun and quite a challenge this year; we lost a lot of experienced members last year, he said.

But it's a challenge that comes with opportunity: a large group of new team members.

Were bouncing back," he said. "Its really exciting to focus on new members this year."

Natalie Dupuy, also a CV senior in her fourth year on the team and captain of the business team, said about half of the 36 members are new to the team and most of those are freshmen.

The team is meeting three days a week to work on building its robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition, an event with thousands of teams from the United States and across the world. It tasks teams of high school students with designing and building a robot in just six weeks for a new challenge each year. The teams then bring their robots to regional competitions and play games in small alliances; the winners at those competitions can qualify for regional and then world championship events.

This years challenge involves having robots help teams collect fuel (in the form of whiffle balls) and gears needed for them to power an airship (the control platform the students pilot from). The whiffle balls must be tossed into a target high off the ground and the gears must be placed precisely on pegs. Teams can also earn points at the end of the match by having their robot climb the airship.

Dupuy said the team members have prepared for this build season by doing an unofficial off-season competition, BunnyBot, during the fall. The competition is intended to give new team members a lower-stakes chance to learn to build a robot over a longer build season. According to Dupuy, the CV team has participated in BunnyBot in past years, but often during the competition, seniors would take over finishing the robot in the last weeks so that it would be competition-ready. This year, though, the juniors and seniors didnt touch the robot being built for BunnyBot.

Dupuy said she enjoyed being able to repay the people who trained her by passing her knowledge onto new team members.

Its amazing that years ago someone did that for me, and Im finally able to share, she said.

However, with the end of build season coming Feb. 21, Sundberg said the team is behind where it wants to be: In past years, he said, the drive system was working at this point and team members were focusing on adding other systems to the robot, but this year they arent that far.

He said after team members complete the drive system, they will prioritize completing mechanisms to collect gears for the airship and a climbing mechanism. If time allows, they will add a mechanism for collecting and shooting the whiffle ball fuel for the airship. The programming team is working on software for the robot that would use cameras to help automate some of their processes.

We may not go for every feature we planned, but well be happy with it, he said.

Sundberg said robotics is a great opportunity for high school students to get hands-on experience with engineering and business.

Dupuy added that shes formed a lot of friendships through robotics: including classmates at CV, members of Corvallis High School's robotics team, and even people from all over the world at championship events.

I refer to it as my family of nerds, she said.

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Crescent Valley robotics focused on developing freshmen - Corvallis Gazette Times