MANCHESTER, N.H. – Recently, Spark Academy’s Team B, a.k.a. “Hello Kitty,” competed in the Vex Robotics Championship in Saint Louis, facing off against 860 teams across 46 different countries.
The team, one of eight at Spark Academy, won the New Hampshire/Vermont High School competition in February at Manchester Community College.
This year’s game, called “Pushback”, was played on a 12’ x 12’ square field where two groups of teams known as “alliances,” autonomously and manually instruct a robot to move small blocks into certain goal areas and park those robots in particular areas by the end of the match.
Unlike the Manchester-based FIRST Robotics, Vex robots are much smaller and cost significantly less, with Spark Academy Vex Coach Dan Larochelle describes as “an erector set on steroids.”
Larochelle says his role on the team is limited to “pizza and parts” as coaches only intervene when the kids had a question, leading to the kids continually building and rebuilding their robots over time looking for continual improvement. This season, Team B spent approximately 500 hours working on their various robots to get them just right.
“They make mistakes and learn from them and eventually they can take a robot apart and put it back together in a week,” he said. “You’ll come in on a Wednesday and see there is a bucket of parts on the table, say that there’s a competition on Saturday and they compete on Saturday.”
In addition to his role as coach, Larochelle also teaches engineering to some of the students in addition to his role as Chair of the Automated Manufacturing Department at Manchester Community College, which shares a campus with Spark Academy.
In addition to the camaraderie and fun gained from the practice and building and competitions, Larochelle also says that the work put in helps reinforce concepts from the classroom and builds STEM skills that can translate into the workplace.
“They’ll see something with the robot and say ‘oh, that’s what (Larochelle) means by friction, oh that’s what (Larochelle) means by torque,” he said. “Failures and realizations and growth build real life skills, which along with teamwork, is what STEM-field employers look for.”
More on Team B can be found on their YouTube page.