USU hosts competitive robotics tournament
USU hosted some of the most skilled teams in high school and middle school competitive robotics in a world-qualifying tournament — the Utah and Mountain Region Vex Robotics Championship.
Robots built by students from Utah and Idaho faced off Saturday on standardized courses, moving foam cylinders and balls to score points.
“Some of the best robots in the world were at this competition,” said Gary Stewardson, an associate professor of technology and engineering education at USU who coordinated the tournament.
Five teams from the competition qualified to compete in the 2012 Vex Robotics World Championship in Anaheim, Calif.
Vex is a competitive robot organization that aims to make competitions affordable for teams to enter, Stewardson said. Only Vex parts can be used in a robotic design, preventing the teams with more money from winning every competition with more expensive components, he said.
Stewardson said 10 teams in the mountain region rank in the top 100 competitive robotics school teams in the world in programming skills, and four teams were in the top 100 for robot skills.
Competitive robotics started around 20 years ago and were inspired in part by sports, Stewardson said.
“The idea was, ‘Let’s get the excitement of a sporting event in an engineering-design challenge.’ And that’s what they’ve done,” Stewardson said.
Daniel Brunell, a student from Weber High School, said winning at the tournament was one of the best experiences of his life. Brunell is on the Two Rivers Vex robotics team, which draws students from throughout Weber School district. The Two Rivers team won a judge’s excellence award for its robot design.
Maurice Brunell, Daniel’s father, said he’s glad his son has had a chance to compete in robotics.
“When he told me that he was starting to do his robotics stuff, I was thrilled,” Brunell said. “It’s not an opportunity that everybody gets.”
USU alumnus Steve Williams advises competitive robotics teams at Mountain Crest High School, but he said some students might not be getting the opportunity to compete in robotics simply because the program isn’t well-known yet.
“Right now we kind of fly under the radar,” Williams said. “We’re not super well-known. Some people at Mountain Crest don’t even know we have a robotics team.”
Students who do participate have benefited from their efforts, Williams said. Vex has even changed educational goals for some kids, he said.
“I have a team that has students (for whom) college was not even a dream,” Williams said. “And now they’re applying for scholarships.”
As students build robots and compete, they gain confidence in their abilities, he said.
“It gives the students an opportunity to be successful at something that is deemed academic,” Williams said. “They go to their first competition, and that’s when they really start getting excited. They see that, ‘Not only can I do this, I can do it better than other people.'”
As a graduate student, Williams was instrumental in bringing competitive robotics to USU, Stewardson said. He and Williams agreed that if Williams could raise student interest in competitive robotics, he would help raise funds.
“He got the interest, I got the funding — we went to the world’s event and competed in the first college division event,” Stewardson said.
Though the USU team did well in its first efforts, Stewardson said he noticed a couple of teams seemed to have the advantage when it came to strategy.
“We talked to them and found out they had worked with high school teams,” Stewardson said. “So they knew the nuances of the game, because they had been at these events … and we were kind of figuring out those nuances in the middle of a three-day tournament.”
At the time USU started taking interest in Vex competitions, no high schools in the area had teams competing, Stewardson said. The nearest tournaments were in Denver, Las Vegas and Seattle, he said.
“We were right in the middle of a dead zone,” he said. “I had to lean on a bunch of teachers who I had graduated to get teams together.”
USU hosted its first Vex competition three years ago with 10 teams, he said. Saturday’s tournament hosted 27 teams, and the region is one of the fastest-growing in Vex competitions.
Though the university hosted the regional championship for the middle- and high-school level this year, USU originally got involved with robotics in secondary education to help its own Vex team, Stewardson said.
Cody Salyer, a sophomore studying engineering, helped with the event. Working on the robots, he said, helps an individual see what really works for a particular design and what won’t.
A member of the USU Vex Robotics Team and an adviser for Design Academy, an extracurricular engineering program for local middle and high school students, Salyer said he thinks building projects like Vex robots is a more practical approach to engineering than studying theory in a classroom.
“We’ve had a couple designs that looked great on paper, but they didn’t pan out,” Salyer said.
– steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu