Photo provided Competitors work a robot competition at the Super Saturday Holiday Hussle, held at Northside Middle School in December.
After experiencing rapid growth in the past couple of years, BCSC’s VEX Robotics program is looking to further establish itself with its most expansive event yet.
Columbus East High School will be the site of Jan. 18’s RoboRodeo VEX IQ Robotics Competition, a state qualifier where four teams or more may earn bids to the 2025 Indiana State Robotics Championship, held in March at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.
A total of 74 teams at the elementary and middle-school levels will compete at what Lisa Haines, a BCSC robotics event partner and coach of the Smith Elementary Sonic Cyborgs, said is the largest robotics event BCSC has hosted to date.
“Most events run about 45 teams attending, but with BCSC having so many teams, we wanted to make sure that we made the competition where we were bringing in as many other teams as we possibly could,” Haines said.
BCSC will have 29 teams represented, a long way from the three teams they started with during the 2022-23 school year.
Competition will start at 9:30 a.m. and will last over two sessions, with a break for lunch in the middle of the day.
Organizers prefer to have themed-competitions to make the events a little bit more fun. And while students will show up adorning the shirt representing specific teams, they may add in some other elements in commemoration of the technological hoedown.
“They’ll wear their team shirt, along with a little bit of Western attire,” per Haines. “Some of them will show up in cowboy hats or maybe some bandanas.”
Every year, VEX IQ has a different competition game teams play and this year’s game is called “Rapid Relay,” played on a 6-foot by 8-foot rectangular field.
“Two robots compete in the Teamwork Challenge as an alliance in 60 second long teamwork matches, working collaboratively to score points,” a description of the game says. “Teams also compete in the Robot Skills Challenge where one robot takes the field to score as many points as possible.”
The Robot Skills Challenge involves Driving Skills Matches, which are entirely driver-controlled, and Autonomous Coding Skills Matches, where students basically hit a button and then their robot does a number of different tasks based upon coding they wrote.
Aside from their performance during competition on the day itself, team members are also judged based upon their engineering notebooks, which they are required to hand over in advance.
In the notebooks, students detail the design process for their robot and enter daily notes about what they are working on. Some of them fill more than 100 pages, according to Haines, who said many of them are “quite impressive.”
Students from Ivy Tech, IU Columbus, along with C4 students will leaf through the notes and help judge that part of the competition.
The event will have an added touch as well. While the Columbus East High School Orange Pit will be the site of the competition, in the upper-level hallway opposite of the concessions stand will be opportunities for those not competing to also work on their STEM skills.
As part of North student RuthAnne Gilroy’s senior project, students from kindergarten through sixth grade will get the chance to participate in free hands-on STEM activities, organized in stations.
Davida Harden, curriculum specialist for STEM activities, said Gilroy had fallen in love with STEM and reached out showing interest in working with them at one of the district’s many STEM events.
Out of that came three different stations intended for students of varying ages.
Some students, for example, will create an LED robotic circuit, while second and third-graders will create a Stegosaurus Rex dinosaur, according to organizers.
The older students, between third and sixth grade, will be playing sports, although not in the traditional manner.
During “Get Your Game On: All Things Football, Soccer and Basketball,” participants will go through an engineering design process as they build the components and launchers that make playing the sports in a new way possible.
“We want to introduce our kids to as much of a STEM-focus that we can give just because it opens so many doors for them,” Harden said of the stations. “… It’s the same thing we spark in the STEM labs that we have in the district. It’s just one more way of introducing kids to careers and opportunities.”
The stations will be available from 10 a.m. to noon, and again from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Harden said they hope to offer something similar in future BCSC-hosted robotics events.
BCSC has four teams who have already qualified for state— three on the middle school and one on the elementary school level.
Three of those teams punched their ticket due to their performance at December’s Super Saturday Holiday Hussle, held at Northside Middle School.
Smith Elementary’s Sonic Circuits qualified after bringing home the Elementary School Excellence Award, the top honor given to the team that awards excellence in all aspects of the competition.
Central Middle Schools’s Cybersaurs and Central Cyborgs qualified during the tournament as well, winning the Teamwork Champion and Middle School Excellence awards.
Central’s Engineers of the Round Table earned their spot at Shelbyville Middle School’s Post Halloween Haunt VEX IQ Blended State Qualifier in November, where they won the Teamwork Champion Award.
Organizers are also looking for anyone interested in helping out, particularly with “wrangling kids,” in concert with the event’s theme.
“If people are wanting to come and help us out, we would be very thankful for any assistance we could get, especially with wrangling kids, getting them to go to the right places at the right times,” Haines said. “… The kids do most of the work themselves, but they do need an adult there to get them through some lines every so often.”
Those interested can sign up to volunteer by scanning the QR-code on the event poster and filling out an accompanying Google form.
