Robotics team to compete in third international competition

Date: 3/21/2011

March 21, 2011

By Chris Maza

Reminder Assistant Editor

EAST LONGMEADOW — East Longmeadow High School students have successfully built robots. What are they going to do next?

They're going to Disney World!

The robotics team at East Longmeadow High School is making its final preparations for the VEX World Robotics Championship at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., April 14 to 16.

In what will be their third trip to the world championships in as many years, 10 members, split into two groups — A team and C team — will have their robots compete in completing a task. In 2010, the team won the world championship's Create Award.

"The first year, we had six students and qualified for the world championship in 2009. In 2010, we had four teams and qualified all of them. In 2011, we started with four teams and now we're down to two and we qualified both of them," Peter Van Buren, a physics teacher and robotics team mentor at the high school, said.

Van Buren had a vision for a robotics team ever since he came to East Longmeadow in 2007.

"I had taught for one year in Worcester, where they had a huge robotics program," Van Buren said. "When I interviewed for this job, I told them I wanted to not just be a physics teacher, but I also wanted to start a robotics program here."

With a grant from the East Longmeadow Educational Endowment Fund (ELEEF), the project got under way and the following year, ELEEF followed up its initial grant with $3,000 to expand the program.

Van Buren said while the students get a kick out of the competition, which he described as having "an atmosphere as competitive as a high school basketball game," there are real educational benefits to the program.

"It's very unique in its nature, especially because it's student driven," Van Buren said. "I don't build the robots for them. I don't design them. I give them the means with which to build them and the rest is their creation. This kind of experience is much different than what they get in the classroom."

Nathan Varney is a junior and member of this year's A team, which is composed of more experienced robot builders. He and Max Lu, one of the robotics team's original members, explained the task their robot must complete at the competition:Teaming up with another group's creation to form an "alliance", the robot must pick up plastic tubes and place them over goals successfully.

"You get points for putting your color tube over the goals," Varney said.

Varney also explained that a ladder in the center of the course is also an aspect of the competition.

"If you climb the ladder, you also get more points," Varney said. "We can't do that at the moment, but we're hoping we're close."

The designing of the robots is a long-term project, requiring a large amount of time dedicated to it.

"We've been working on this since the summer," Lu said. "We redesigned this a few times. We've put a few hundred hours of work into it."

Lu said the collaboration of different ideas makes for a good robot, but can also be challenging.

"I think the hardest part is working with different opinions and ideas and trying to coordinate everything so we can accomplish what we want to accomplish," he said.

Conner Harper, a sophomore member of the C team said a lot of ideas for robot designs don't actually come to fruition.

"This is the third design we've made," Harper said, referring to the B team robot. "But in our heads, we've probably come up with about 100 more. Whenever I would go over an idea in my head, there were always troubles. I would always find a fault with the robot."

While the A team — made up of Varney, Lu, Scott Pardo, Matt Aslo, Josh Kessler, Tom Hampton and Pat Dillon — and the C team — consisting of Harper, Joe Zemba and Kevin Wynne — are both representing East Longmeadow, that doesn't stop the two from being competitive with each other.

"They never pick us to be in an alliance with them," Harper said. "But it gives us a chance to show our own stuff and when we win with this robot, we'll have proved something to them. It's kind of a right of passage."