Robotics competitions in the St. Vrain Valley School district have consumed the attention of many young minds. Of the two local competition styles, one has broken a world record while they both rank in the world.
Working with SVVSD, Up-A-Creek Robotics is a high school team that competes in the FRC, or FIRST Robotics Competition, style or robotic competition. The team is comprised of around 13 high school students who come together from schools throughout the district.
In FRC competitions, teams receive the layout of the course their robots have to navigate before the season begins, allowing them time to build and program robots to complete the objectives. During a competition, each team allies with another to score the most points in the course.
During the weekend of Feb. 5, Up-A-Creek teamed up TechnoRaptors, a robotics club from Boulder, to place small yellow boxes and little white balls on platforms, each scoring various amounts of points, said Carson Rumsey who is a junior and attends the APEX school, a homeschool program in SVVSD. The competition sets a 6 point gain for most common actions and up to 20 points for a few bonus activities within the two-minute rounds.
“It takes a lot of coordination and communication with your alliance partner to score a world record and for us that world record is 344 points,” Rumsey said.
“We were really proud of what we accomplished and hyping each other up … It was just a really fun moment that really showed how proud we are of the season and how far we’ve come,” said Maria Arrece who is a freshman at Niwot High School.
The previous record-holding score was around 329 points and the members and mentors of Up-A-Creek expect the record to change hands again throughout the competition year.
“My favorite thing to do is see how the scores change each week of the competitions. You can see how the teams get better, they learn from each other. The kids are avid watchers of other matches … and learn from those to adapt their strategies to do better in our state tournaments,” said Teresa Ewing, Computer Science teacher at Niwot High School and team mentor.
Until then, the Up-A-Creek team holds the number one ranking in the world.
As with everything the pandemic has kept these students from traveling to competitions such as the world championships. However, prior to the shutdowns, the Up-A-Creek team held the fourth place ranking among its world competitors including teams from Europe and China.
Some of the FTC team members also compete in the VEX Robotics competition. FRC and VEX both challenge students to build robots to complete tasks in a course but have differing sets of rules.
The VEX program in SVVSD reaches all the way into the elementary school level with 154 teams throughout the system.
“We have some really high performing students who are really engaged with robotics at a couple of different locations,” said Axel Rietzig, director of Innovation at the SVVSD Innovation Center.
Students on the SVVSD VEX team have outpaced other local teams and have to seek tougher competition in other states, according to Tyler Plaster, a junior at Silver Creek High School.
The team still attends local competitions. While there, they not only compete but they also help other teams prepare for the tournament. This ranges from troubleshooting a problem with a robot to sharing pointers on the course.
These high school students began their interest in the VEX competition in middle school under the mentorship of Dan Hernandez, a teacher at Westview Middle School.
They were so highly committed to the program that they willingly forfeited their lunch periods for 30 extra minutes to tweak their robots. When the pandemic eliminated their shared space in the schools, parents jumped in to create an arena and donated garage space.
“That desire to compete and to succeed at the highest level they can succeed at is really supported by going to these signature events (out of state tournaments) where they are facing teams that are the same commitment level, same quality level,” Reitzig said.
Interest in robotics has grown throughout SVVSD. Now all high schools offer courses in robotics both for competition and for practical applications. Some middle and elementary schools also have recently begun courses to put students on track for careers in robotics, Reitzig said.
“We’re building opportunities for our students to develop the skills and the interest in these fields, which then they can have a really good comparable work,” Reitzig said.
