Students showcase robots at competition in Upper St. Clair
A round of Velocity Vortex is about to start.
Members of the STEEL Serpents – dressed in red, white and black – drive their robots during the tournament. From right are Tate Hartman and Zach Gregory. In the yellow shirts are members of the G-Force team from Maryland.
Members of the Infinity Robotechs get ready to compete in the Velocity Vortex. From left are Evan Thomas, Brandon Thomas, Josh Vester, Andy Miller and Drew McConnell.
A robot is ready for action.
Members of the host team Bot of Gold check out a trophy before presenting it. From left are Maggie Lowden, Vanessa Benonis, Sofia Putorti, Victoria Semenov, and Noelle Pirain. All are middle school students in Upper St. Clair.
Members of the Bot of Gold team are pictured with Daphne Frownfelter, second from right at top, during the event the team hosted at Upper St. Clair High School.
Members of Infinity Robotechs: front, from left, Drew McConnell, Brandon Thomas, Evan Thomas; back, Sam Luttringer, Andy Miller and Josh Vester. Team member not pictured is Owen Belfiore.
The STEEL Serpents team has members from Peters Township and Upper St. Clair.
A member of the T-Noble Knights, from Noble Academy Cleveland, works on his team’s robot.
Teams received plenty of audience support at the tournament.
Thomas Zawislak, FIRST Tech Challenge affiliate partner and Pennsylvania FIRST Robotics chairman, announces award recipients.
Members of the TBD team, from Aurora, Ohio, get ready for competition.
Examples of robots built by FIRST Tech Challenge teams
The Robotic Doges team traveled from the Laurel Highlands for the tournament.
Members of G-Force check out their instructions.
Robots take a break from the action.
The BrainSTEM team is based in Baden, Beaver County.
The balls were dropping through the hoops in the Upper St. Clair High School gymnasium, but not in a way that Wilt Chamberlain would have imagined.
The school was the site of the Southwestern Qualifying Tournament of the Pennsylvania FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Program, with student-built robots playing the parts of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.
Two dozen teams of seventh- through 12th-graders, some from Maryland and Ohio, competed Jan. 14 in a game called Velocity Vortex, in which the balls represent particles and the hoops symbolize vortices in a series of physics-based exercises.
Hosting the tournament for the program – FIRST stands for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology – was Bot of Gold, a team of Upper St. Clair students that is in its first year of competition.
“There are so many different aspects and so many different skills that they’re learning,” their coach, Lyn Benonis, said. “They’re learning how to build a robot, how to design it, how to program it. They learn that failure is inevitable, and once they fail, they just have to reassess and fix it, and move on with it.”
As members of the host team, the nine members of Bot of Gold didn’t compete in the Upper St. Clair event, but joined the ranks of volunteers to help ensure that the proceedings went smoothly.
“The mentors and the coaches of these teams are volunteers,” Thomas Zawislak, FIRST Tech Challenge affiliate partner and Pennsylvania FIRST Robotics chairman, said. “They want to work with students. They want to encourage students to move forward in paths, not only in engineering, science and technology, but to become just good, responsible, productive human beings as they move forward in their lives.”
Zawislak, a Chester County resident, complimented the hosts.
“This tournament is wonderful,” he said. “The key element here is that we have volunteers who are very good. But also, Upper St. Clair School District has been extremely supportive. They have a robotics program here already, so they understand robotics and the value to their students.”
He explained that the teams in the competition represent various ways of students getting together.
“Some of them are school-based, or it might be an after-school program,” Zawislak said. “There are also neighborhood teams, where friends just get together, start a robotics team, and then they go find their funding and sponsorship.”
The latter has been the case for Infinity Robotechs, one of the teams competing at Upper St. Clair. Brandon Thomas, a Peters Township High School sophomore, gathered his buddies to start a team and also included his brother, seventh-grader Evan.
“What’s amazing about it is that it’s not just the technical part, where they’re building a robot,” their mother and coach, Robin Thomas, said “These kids have to do presentations. They have to do marketing. They really get a well-rounded view of what things are going to be like when they graduate.”
Part of their experience is community outreach. For example, they have been working with McMurray Elementary School enrichment facilitator Beth Walsh to demonstrate their robot to fifth- and sixth-graders.
“Their goal is not only to get these kids interested in creating new teams, but adding younger students to their own team to take the reins, as they will graduate in a couple of years,” Thomas explained.
Another local team at the Jan. 14 event was the STEEL Serpents, with members from Peters Township and Upper St. Clair. The students operated a help desk, tying in with the philosophy of FIRST Tech Challenge.
“You may be competing against each other, but it’s all for the greater good,” Roxanne Zeisloft said. Her husband, Eric, coaches the squad, which was formed four years ago with a merger of two teams from Peters and Upper St. Clair.
Competitors are helpful on the playing field, too, as she told about a tournament in which her charges provided assistance to another team that ended up finishing first, just ahead of the STEEL Serpents.
“That’s OK,” the Peters Township resident said. “That’s what it’s all about, spurring each other on.”
For more information about FIRST Tech Challenge, visit www.firstinspires.org/robotics/ftc.