The photograph above was taken last week during Tech Challenge brackets at Cobo Center in Detroit for the latest FIRST Robotics Championship. Teams at each of four age-based skill levels had advanced to this arena over the course of the 2017-18 school year, to these final play-offs featuring robots that they themselves have built and programmed. [1,2]
Anyone who’s heard of Lego Mindstorms is in the ballpark of understanding this world.
“FIRST Lego League Jr” is for students in grades K-4. “FIRST Lego League” is for elementary and middle school-aged students who are given the opportunity to “research a real-world engineering challenge, develop a solution, and compete with Lego-based robots of their own design” built from standardized kit components. [3,4]
After that, their next level is “FIRST Tech Challenge” and middle school is the threshold. The kits and controls are more advanced, the robots must perform to higher standards. This year — like all years — teams began with their boxes of parts, then received whole new game instructions, to be satisfied in less than two months. [5,6]
Saline Middle School has two robotics teams at this level. They are now wrapping up their third year since launch and are distinguished as “Cybugs” and “Hornet Hackers.” [7]
“FIRST Robotics Competition” is for high school-aged teams and allows students to move beyond many of the constraints that define levels described here above. The SHS Team 5066 goes by the name “Saline Singularity” and is a couple of years older than our Middle School team. Like many initiatives, one measure of their impact can be found in sponsorships they’ve secured: Ford, Gentherm, Michigan Department of Education, Rockwell Automation, and Toyota. [8,9,10,11,12,13]
For a glimpse of the ends here, you might have followed Twitter @NAVYA_Group during the 2018 FIRST Robotics Championship in April. The France-headquarted smart shuttle manufacturer sponsored its home Robo’Lyon youth team — which qualified to compete during the Detroit event. Enthusiastically, several employees from the NAVYA operation in Saline showed up at Cobo to root for their STEM talent from across the Atlantic. [14,15,16,17]
It shouldn’t be hard to guess what this collaboration suggests about where NAVYA sees one of its most important opportunities for the future.
To get a more basic understanding of local standings, Saline Journal met with Saline Middle School Robotics lead mentor Jeroen Spitael before the close of the FIRST Robotics Championship. He’s been with our teams since inception and has a firm eye on what the must remain the top priorities of the program here. “Everyone has to be having a good time, and they have to be learning,” he asserted.
“Our team did okay it’s first year,” he added. “We went to state in our second.” This year, one of the Saline teams made it to the last best-of-three bracket, then took that to three matches before falling short of the win necessary for Championship competition.
That answers the opening question here. Saline is what’s missing from the photograph above.
Four months from now, the cycle begins again. The FIRST Robotics Championship will be held in Detroit three more years before locating to its next rotation. And the youth in Saline robotics plan to earn a place to compete at Cobo Center while its here — and there’s every reason to believe they will do that and more.
In the meantime: Saline sports fans would do well to get as familiar with these rules as they are for scoring baseball or golf.
September will be back before you know it.
References
- FIRST Robotics Competition (home page).
- “What’s FIRST Robotics Competition?” Official FIRST (October 13, 2016).
- “EV3 Classroom Solutions” Lego Education.
- Lego Education (home page).
- “Robotics” Pitsco.
- “FIRST Relic Recovery presented by Qualcomm” FIRST Tech Challenge (September 9, 2017) YouTube.
- Saline Middle School Robotics: 10644 Cybugs and 10645 Hornet Hackers (home page).
- Saline Singularity Team 5066 (home page).
- Ford Motor Company (home page).
- Gentherm (home page).
- Michigan Department of Education (home page).
- Rockwell Automation (home page).
- Toyota (home page).
- “NAVYA” Twitter.
- NAVYA (home page).
- Robo’Lyon (home page).
- “NAVYA Major Partner of Robo’Lyon” (April 10, 2018) NAVYA.
Hashtag
#firstchamp
