Students gather in Oxford for statewide robotics competition – Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

Chaning Green | Buy at photos.djournal.com Middle and high school students from all over the state congregated in the Tad Smith Coliseum at the University of Mississippi on Saturday morning to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge. Students have been working for months on their robots that they had to design and build for the event.

By Chaning Green

Oxford Citizen

OXFORD The FIRST Tech Challenged returned to the University of Mississippi campus for the fifth time Saturday morning.

This years competition, hosted at the Tad Pad, featured middle and high school teams from across the state seeking to complete a challenge with the most amount of points and be declared champion.

Each year, teams participating in the FIRST Tech Challenge are required to build a robot that in order to most efficiently complete an assigned task on a small pitch. This years challenge was called Velocity Vortex. The challenge required students to design and build a robot that can fit in an 18-inch box. The robot can expand, but must be able to fit into that box in its smallest form. The pitch is divided diagonally, a red side and a blue side. Teams are stationed on each side of the pitch and given a number of whiffle balls that they must put into elevated goals in order to earn points. Four beacons are clipped onto the sides of the pitch, two on each divided half. The robots must be able to independently press a button on their appropriate beacon. In the center of the pitch under the elevated goal posts are two, 21-inch balls. If competitors are able to lift these balls and set them on top of their goal, they are awarded a whopping 40 points.

Students were on the floor of the Tad Pad in costume, some with crazy-colored hair or shoulder pads made of duct tape and broken CDs, light-up pins and stray microchips, looking like fallen cyborg warriors from the future. They were in tents set up all over the coliseum floor that held banners with their team name in big letters. Teams were huddled together making final adjustments to their robots. Others were in the few pitches set up on the court, making practice runs. Some of their robots had tall, extendable arms and tubes and turny bits that fired whiffle balls at targets with deadly accuracy.

Tupelo Middle School was at the competition, competing under the team name Wavebots. This is the first year for TMS to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge. Team members spent the last several months preparing for the competition. Students stayed after school multiple days a week, programming, coding and building to get the perfect robot. Last year, the middle school had an after school activity involving robots, so this wasnt the first go round for some of the eighth-graders on the team.

Judy Harden teaches science at the middle school and is the faculty advisor over the Tupelo Wavebots.

She said that shes been so impressed with how dedicated all of the students have been when working toward this competition.

All of this has been totally student-led, Harden said, before the competition Saturday morning. They built the robot entirely themselves. Our engineers didnt come in and help them get started. We got a sponsor, ACCO Brands out of Booneville to help us and theyve been a really huge help to us, financially and otherwise. They even sent two engineers over to check out or robot there at the end. Were hoping next year to go even bigger.

Harden said that this getting ready for this years competition was so much fun that there are already students looking to join the team next year. She expects the Wavebots to be bigger and even better for next years FIRST Tech Challenge.

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Students gather in Oxford for statewide robotics competition - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal