Local robotics team advances to regional competition – Daily Record-News

If Chesna Kern had to describe her robotics team in one word it would be unique. Out of seven team members, five of them are girls.

And that is so rare here, Kern said.

The 17-year-old team captain navigated her team, Team 4495 or Haywire, through the weekend of FIRST Robotics Pacific Northwest Competition at Central Washington University. The Kittitas County team, and more than 1,000 high school students from Portland to Spokane, participated in qualifying rounds where robots performed tasks to gain points over the weekend.

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While Haywire did not advance past a quarterfinal round, the teams season was unforgettable. The local students left the competition ranked 15th out of 145 teams in the Pacific Northwest District.

The team also brought home the Engineering Inspiration Award, advancing them to a regional competition next month in Cheney. The award celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a teams school and community.

The award was given to the team because of Parker and Greta Mayers work with Nerdy Girls, a robotics nonprofit aimed at getting more girls into tech, and because of the teams work on setting up an after-school robotics program for middle schoolers at Thorp Schools.

The steampunk theme of the competition required robots to deliver gears to an airship for its rotors, picking up and shooting wiffle balls for fuel, and as a finishing move the robots had to pull themselves up on a rope for liftoff. Teams were in sets of threes, called alliances, allowing different teams and their robots to specialize in a specific task.

Breakthrough season

The team was unique for its composition of girls, but also because of its small size and its limited access to resources and funding.

The difference was obvious in the pits, where teams set up pop-up shops to work on their robots. Teams surrounding Haywire easily had more than 30 team members, all equipped with state-of-the-art tools and mentors fresh out of the technology sectors on the West Side.

Haywire is still growing in size; last year they only had four members. They began expanding the business side and community outreach aspect of their team this season with the help of retired Boeing project manager Synneva Wang.

This has seriously been the year of breakthroughs for our team, said Parker Mayer, the teams programmer.

Before Wangs arrival, the team spent most of its time working on the robot. Since then, the team has introduced a middle school coding class and after school robotics program at Thorp Schools, a summer robotics program where they recruit from, and Mayer has broken ground on a nonprofit called Nerdy Girls aimed at getting more girls into robotics.

Wang came in, Mayer said, got the team organized with a plan on how they would offer robotics to other kids in the area. She even brought over a programming mentor from the Issaquah Robotics Society, her previous team, to teach them new coding. And its worked.

Were really proud of ourselves, last year being a defensive bot we had to get pulled along by other people, but this year were scoring ourselves, and weve just made really big strides, Kern said.

Their new mentor, who spent 30 years working for Boeing, met the team last season while mentoring for the Issaquah team. Wang said the Haywire team was humble and eager to learn. She drives over from Bellevue at least once a week for the teams meet ups.

Its a beautiful drive across the mountains, its just 90 minutes, and theyre a great team that really want to learn and thats what its all about, being a mentor and helping kids learn, she said.

Wang hopes the team receives the recognition it deserves in the community and eventually grows to a sustainable level.

New members

Faith Cooper, 12, is a new member and a product of a successful robotics summer program. Cooper, who is also part of Mayers Nerdy Girls program, was helping on the field as a human player. She was on the airship in charge of gathering gears.

Its amazing, I love it so much, she said about her first season.

A pair of siblings also joined the team for the season. Sophomore Taliesin Tenerelli, 14, fed gears to the robots via a chute. He had previous experience in a younger league called the FIRST LEGO League.

The competition, he said, was a lot more casual than he thought itd be.

Its really fun, he said.

His older sister, Raine, was in charge of putting together an engineering handbook that outlines the rules of the game and explains what their robot can do. She had joined the team as a freshman, and took a break to focus on Running Start classes at Central, and then rejoined for her junior year.

This season is the last one for Kern, who will be graduating and hopefully heading off to Gonzaga University for mechanical engineering, something she said she would have never been interested in without the FIRST program.

Its kind of bittersweet because Im going to be going to college and thats going to be a whole new experience, and Im not going to have the stress of this but then at the same time Im going to really miss talking to the other teams, she said. Theres nothing like this, so Ill probably end up volunteering.

Kern has been on the team for four years, volunteering when she was in the eighth grade.

I think people dont realize just how many opportunities there are in this program. It looks like its just building and designing a robot, but its really not. Theres so much more to it, she said.

Team members are involved in design, programming, public speaking, business plans and community outreach. And with a team as small as Haywire, everyone gets their hands on a little piece of the process, which is good news for Mayer.

Whats really cool about this year is that were really small so everybody is getting a ton of experience, which is going to help us next year with training newbies and getting a bunch of more kids on the team, Mayer said. I just think next year is going to be bigger and better. Im super excited.

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Local robotics team advances to regional competition - Daily Record-News