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SYRACUSE – Wawasee High School’s “Iron Pride” robotics team finished third in the 2018 VEX Robotics World Championship Skills Challenge in Louisville, Ky., April 25-28.
“It’s a lot like winning a bronze medal in the Olympics,” said team sponsor Jed Wandland. “This is a big deal.”
The team finished 16th of 96 teams in its division in the overall competition, then partnered with another school to advance to the quarterfinals. In each round, teams from different schools are partnered in a blind draw. A total of 46 countries were represented in the world championships.
It was in the quarterfinals the combined teams were eliminated by the top-ranked team in the division.
In the skills competition, the Iron Pride earned its way to the main stage of the competition, where its robot performed in Freedom Hall in front of all the competitors from around the world.
“It was an awesome experience for the kids. They performed really well,” Wandland said.
Wandland was named Mentor of the Year, and the team won the “Think” award for best programming at the state championships.
While it was Joe Kelsheimer, Nick Murphy and brothers Evan and Micah Rassi collecting the hardware, they had a lot of help from teammates and the community, including numerous sponsors.
Each year the competition is different, with the world tournament ending one season and marking the beginning of the new year.
“This year the robot is supposed to stack smaller cones on a bigger cone, then place the cones inside a scoring zone. The idea was to make a robot that can stack a lot of cones really quickly,” said Micah Rassi, one of three juniors on the team. Evan Rassi is a freshman.
“We all had a hand in building the robot. I did all the programming, but there’s other roles that we delegated among the team members. To complete the challenge, we had to make an engineering notebook that describes our entire build process. We have to have long, autonomous programs where the robot is driving itself.”
The engineering notebook is a 500-page mass of robotic notes that the competitors more or less commit to memory.
“In competitions, there’s multiple awards, and one of those is a design award where they interview you and judge you on your knowledge of your notebook and your robot. And so it’s a really involved process,” Micah Rassi said.
“We could give you hours of description of how the robot design went.”
Like every other high school-level contest, it’s not just a matter of putting in 10 to 12 hours a week of practice, but time away from school spent improving skills are critical to success, to the point where it’s necessary to compete at the highest levels.
“We usually have two practices a week of four hours each, and then we usually get together whenever we can. We had weeks where we worked 50 hours, and we took it to our house to work on.”
Wandland said the team asked for a greater opportunity to practice and prepare for tournaments.
“On the last day of the world championships they announce the rules for the next year’s competition; publish all the rules, and you can buy all the equipment. (The Wawasee team) had spent the entire summer working on it,” Wandland said.
“In advanced summer camp, it’s more like ‘here’s the rules, here’s all the parts you need. Now go!’ These guys had a pretty decently flushed-out robot by the time school started in August. They spent 80 hours in summer camp working on it.
“But they wanted more practice time, and so they asked if they could borrow the full competition field with all the bells and whistles. I said, ‘Yes, but the rest of the team had to be invited, too.’ And so we had a discussion with their parents, laid down some ground rules and just about every Friday night, at least half of the club was there until 11:30, in which case they were either locked in or locked out.”
Micah Rassi added, “So we had between 12 and 20 kids crammed into our basement around this 12-by-12 competition field, often until the wee hours on a Friday night before a Saturday competition, working on and fine tuning the robot.”
For most teams, there is no such thing as the perfect, completed robot project.
“We rebuilt our robot, from scratch, at least three times this season,” Rassi said. “We’re always trying to find what the best way to play the game is, looking at what designs are working best and fine tuning. It’s a lot of work.
“The robot is never done. We were at the world championships and we were still making changes, fine tuning our robot.”
On the trip home Saturday, the team was already working on its robot for the 2018-19 season.
“We’re just excited to get started,” Rassi said.
Wandland said there’s plenty of ways to expand the robotics program from the current three dozen or so students currently involved.
“We have a lot of generous sponsors, and I thank them all for their support,” he said. “But I’d like to raise another $20,000, and then we could easily double the size of the program.”
He said while in Louisville the team was invited to go to China to compete. Wandland has already got an idea of how much plane tickets would cost, and added the coach that made the invitation would help with some significant expenses while they were there.
“The plane tickets were around $1,100 each, and we’d like to take everyone with us,” Wandland said. “So that’s a lot of fundraising.”
Wawasee Principal Kim Nguyen said the program has grown from humble beginnings to competing at the highest levels.
“I was around when all we had was a middle-school Lego robotics club. When Mr. Wandland came to teach physics he said, ‘You know, I like robotics, too.’ So we started a club at the high school,” Nguyen said.
“Now we’re robotics-crazy here at Wawasee.”
People interested in seeing the team in action can go to YouTube and search “574C VEX” for videos. The team also has accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
