PHOTOS BY JENNIFER COLTON
Robots rocked and rolled for Umatilla on Saturday as students conquered disasters, fixed mobility problems and prepped for competitions.
Umatilla students from elementary through high school are working with robotics in FIRST – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology – programs this year.
Much of the attention is on the oldest and most experienced of Umatilla’s groups: the high school club competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). Last year, “Team 4125,” better known as Team Confidential, traveled to St. Louis to compete at the World Finals.
“The students are doing really well this year,” said team mentor Kyle Sipe. “They’re further ahead than we usually are at this point. We’re at the point where all the ideas are coming together. They’re expecting more from us now that we’ve made it to Worlds.”
“They” encompasses not only the team’s fans but its sponsors as well: NASA, JC Penney, Platt, Tom Denchel Ford, The Chuckwagon Café and the Umatilla School District. One of the sponsors – the Chuckwagon Café – even inspired the name for this year’s robot – Chuck.
Senior Caitlin Nelson was one of the students waiting to test her code in action. Nelson is in her second year on the team and said having a year of experience is an advantage.
“It makes it easier to understand where everything is and where it’s going,” she said. “I really love math and programming has a lot of math involved in it, so that helps, too.”
That focus on mathematics, along with the other STEM subjects of science, technology and engineering, is helping fund Umatilla’s expanded robotics program this year. The school district is using grant funds in its STEM Academy, which offers a number of in-school and after-school activities at no cost to students.
While Nelson focused on the code on her computer screen this past Saturday, other teens worked to build a gear box for the shooter, to set up practice bumpers and tear apart prototype designs that didn’t quite work, all to make sure Chuck is ready for this year’s challenge.
At competition, Chuck will lead the team in a game called “Aerial Assist.” In the game, Umatilla will be assigned an alliance with two other teams; their three robots will compete against another alliance to score the most points by passing balls over a 5-foot-tall divider and putting them into various goals. The teams will not know who their alliance members will be until the competition.
The teams first learned of this year’s competition on Jan. 4, when FIRST released the information on its kick-off day. The team is now in the middle of its six-week build season. At the end of the build period, the robot must be “bagged and tagged” to be shipped to the competition.
Umatilla will compete in two competitions this year: March 13-15 at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Wash., and March 27-29 at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash. The points from each competition will be combined, and, if the score is high enough, Umatilla will advance to the Pacific Northwest Regional, April 10-12 in Portland. Only the top 15 will move on to that competition.
Twenty-four students are on the FRC team this year. While half the team worked from the Umatilla High School shop, the other half traveled to Richland as mentors for the eighth annual Tri-Cities Regional FIRST LEGO League tournament. The high school students worked closely with elementary school teams in the competition to help people prepare or rebuild from a natural disaster.
Umatilla’s four teams did not move on to the semi-finals, but did represent the only Oregon competitors at the event, which included 20 teams and 135 students from across the mid-Columbia basin.
Umatilla students are also competing in the FIRST Tech Challenge this year. In that competition, students in grades 7-12 use a kit to design, build and program a robot for a head-to-head challenge. This year’s challenge, “Block Party,” asks robots to move blocks into boxes on a pendulum. Bonus points are also scored for raising a team flag, for balancing the pendulum and for hanging on a bar in the center of the field.
FTC students also set up in the shop on Saturday, testing their own robots on the smooth floor.
“This is our third time building it. Our first one was pretty simple, and each one has been a different robot,” junior Kevin Jaime Garcia said Saturday, watching the shoe-box sized robot move forward a few feet. “I think this one is going to work.” For more information on Umatilla Robotics, visit the team’s website or its Facebook page.
