CRESTON – “On your mark. Get set. Go!”
Paul Klotzle calls out as a group of his Norwayne robotics students start a match against some Chippewa students.
A silence falls across the auditorium as the robots load their programs, only to be broken by a crash as one robot slams its arms on the table.
For the next minute or so, students on both teams move their robots around the arena, hoping it will help them grab more pingpong balls to earn points.
“Seven seconds guys,” Ken Gasser calls out over the frantic voices of the students shortly before Klotzle counts down the final seconds, ending the match.
With the help of Gasser, a math teacher at Chippewa Jr./Sr. High School, Klotzle is able to offer a robotics program at Norwayne High School for the first time this school year. As both groups have grown, the two now hold local robotics competitions to help the students improve and work toward bigger competitions in the spring.
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History of each robotics program
Although the two groups now compete, the Norwayne program started several years after Chippewa had established theirs roughly 11 years ago.
Chippewa Jr./Sr. High School launched its effort as an after-school club, Gasser said. With the help of an alum, the club grew to become Robotics I and II classes, where students learn to code and build robots.
The robotics class at Norwayne High School was offered after Klotzle, a computer and technology teacher at Norwayne Middle School, helped create an elective robotics class for students.
“We allow eighth graders to take a few high school classes as electives … and we kind of needed another option so I said, ‘what about some sort of a robotics?’” Klotzle said.
After seeing interest from high school students, Klotzle established a robotics course at Norwayne High School, modeling it after Chippewa’s classes and offered it for the first time this school year.
Both groups are preparing for the National Robotics Challenge, which will take place April 7 through 9.
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Breakdown of the competitions and how they’re prepping
There are 12 different competition categories offered at the National Robotics Challenge, according to the contest manual, but each robot can only be entered in one category. Some of these categories include Bot Ball, Robo Hockey and Sumo Robot.
Klotzle said there are several robots his students are looking to sign up, and Chippewa plans to bring 22 students and eight robots to the competition, Gasser said.
Gasser also said the students plan to compete in the following categories: Rescue Robot, Autonomous Vehicle Challenge, Bot Ball, Micromouse, and Robot Maze.
With the competition a few months away, Gasser proposed creating local matches between the two schools and Klotzle agreed. Each school hosts a competition every other month where the students get to test their robots and their programming on a live stage.
“It really built (a) time frame,” Klotzle said. “They work for a month, a month of prep for 90 seconds.”
While the style and objective of each match differs depending on the competition, every student will continue to work on their robot to make it better before the competition.
“This gives us small competitions … (to) prepare,” Gasser said. “Work on it for three to four weeks and have fun and learn and whatever we learned from today or from the past four weeks, they can apply in the spring when we go to the big competition.”
Reach Rachel Karas at rkaras@gannett.com
On Twitter: @RachelKaras3
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