Hundreds of high school students from Utah and surrounding states met Friday to compete in the Utah Regional FIRST Robotics Competition.
Teams involved in the three-day regional competition design and build robots that play and compete in qualifying matches at the Maverik Center, with hopes of making it to the national competition in Houston.
The event is co-organized by the University of Utah’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering and FIRST(For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a global non-profit organization that has regional branches across the world.
The organization aims to promote science and give opportunities to young people to get involved in team-based robotics programs for ages four to 18.
“My colleagues in mechanical engineering department of Price, helped organize and start the Utah regional competition for FIRST in 2010,” said university faculty member Evan Lerner. “And it's really just a program where we feel like, it gets the younger kids really excited about STEM, but not just the technical aspects of engineering, but how to work as a team how to solve problems collectively, and just get them really excited about the kinds of stuff that we do at the college level engineering.”
To participate in the competition, students form teams, then are tasked with designing and building an industrial-size, semi-autonomous robot to compete in this year’s FIRST game.
Called “Crescendo,” this year’s game requires robots that can pick up foam rings — called “notes” — then fling, flip, shoot, and drop into various scoring chambers situated around a field of play about the size of half a tennis court. Coordination between robots, along with well-timed actions from their humans, can earn teams bonus points.
Teams must program their robots to operate autonomously for the first 15 seconds of the two-and-a-half-minute matches, then may manually pilot them to execute more complicated maneuvers. Teams must engineer their robots with high degrees of mechanical precision and reliability, but also develop strategy, teamwork, and other interpersonal skills, to come out on top.
According to Kris Nelson, regional director of the local competition, not all students come from schools.
“We do have teams that are home-schooled” Nelson said. “We have teams that are from several different schools and several different communities that don't have enough population to support an entire team.”
For many participants, the event is a glimpse into their future in the world of STEM.
“This is my passion and we have been working really hard," said Christopher Bennet, a high school student from Salt Lake. “I really want to get into engineering when I get into college and this is a really great opportunity. I love FIRST."
