For the RoboDogs, the Vacaville High robotics team, the road to the high school FIRST Robotics Competition World Championships is paved with days of hard work, trial and error, some deadline-related anxiety, high spirits, but mostly just plain old stick-to-itiveness.
After classes Thursday in the team’s epicenter, otherwise known as teacher and adviser Phil Jenschke’s classroom, which by any other terms is a seemingly order-amid-chaos industrial shop, it was enough for some two dozen students just to get ready for the Sacramento Regional contest. It begins Thursday and continues to March 27 at the University of California, Davis. Afterward, they will need to focus on another competition, March 31 to April 1, at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.
And besides, the world championships in St. Louis — where, last year, the RoboDogs bested several other U.S. and international teams, reaching the 33rd spot in a 75-team division, their best performance yet — are more than a month into the future.
Seated in front of a bank of computer monitors, Jenschke’s co-mentor, David Morton, a physics and computer teacher at the West Monte Vista Avenue school, noted the title of the 2016 game, FIRST Stronghold. The game’s name changes every year, but Stronghold is played by two alliances of three teams each. (FIRST is the acronym for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, a nonprofit founded more than 20 years ago and devoted to helping young people discover a passion for science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.)
The idea behind the game, he noted, is relatively straightforward. It involves breaching opponents’ defenses, known as “outer works,” and capturing their “tower” by first firing “boulders” (basketball-sized foam balls) at it, then surrounding or scaling the tower using rungs. Points are gained in several ways: Among them are crossing parts of the outer works, by shooting boulders in the opposing tower’s five goals and by surrounding and scaling the tower.
Nearby, in the crowded “programming room,” or where the ’bot’s “brains” are configured with computer code, junior Jason Kmec, the team’s director of programming, is at work on the computer vision part of the robot.
He points to a tiny camera on the robot, mounted on a vertical bar. It takes input “directly from the camera and processes it so the robot can recognize what it needs,” said Kmec, a straight-A student, standing near senior and fellow straight-A student Jarod Robinson, the Robodogs’ manager of programming.
From “raw data,” said Kmec, a small, largely black rectangular image appears on his laptop screen, where he can “just purely see the target, what angle it is and how far away it is.”
Computer vision is “one of the biggest elements of the ’bot,” he said.
During the past few days, Kmec, who has been involved with robotics since he was 8, and some other team members, including Jered Bell and Austin Haddox, have been quietly trying to resolve last-minute nettlesome problems with the ’bot.
A somewhat new development, girls this year make up a greater percentage of the team, said sophomore Taylor Roff and senior Sydney Smith, two of four on the RoboDogs. Both are involved in the fabrication aspect of the ’bot.
Smith said Jenschke invited her to join the team, perhaps because he recognized “someone who thinks outside the box.”
Roff likes design problems and getting her hands in any tool box or bucket of bolts. Last year, she and her father disassembled a Jeep, right down to the tires and chassis, “and put it back together,” she said, smiling.
She’s also learned from her father how to weld, a skill that is highly useful during the so-called “build season,” the six weeks before the lead-up to the competitions.
“It’s easy for me,” she said.
Smith said she enjoys tapping, dyeing, and drilling metal, another useful skill during build season, which has ended as the regional competitions get underway.
Prompted by a visitor’s question, they paused to consider what they would say to encourage other young women to become interested in robotics.
“I told a couple of friends about it,” said Roff. “It’s really cool.”
“First of all, it looks really great on a college application,” said Smith, smiling. “And I like to hang out with the guys.”
Each year, the competition — so-called “a varsity sport for the mind” and which kicked off with a worldwide webcast Jan. 9 — brings new design and engineering challenges for student teams, said Jenschke, who also teaches the principles of engineering and architectural design.
For one, given the nature of Stronghold, many teams are building smaller ’bots compared to the can-stacking ’bots built last year for Recycle Rush.
The RoboDogs “are meeting the challenges” presented by the new game, said Jenschke, adding, “But the part that’s hard to teach” is how to juggle several ideas, some more practical than others, and settle on the ones that will “work within time limits that we have.”
This year, the ’bot’s requirements are, arguably, “a lot more complex,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with that. They’re learning a lot from the challenge.”
The RoboDogs have two chances to qualify for the world championships, at UC Davis and at Boise State. Good showings at either competition will ensure them a ticket to the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, where, if all goes as planned, they will join some 500 other teams from across the globe.
As in years past, the Robodogs learn more than just STEM and other potentially high-paying 21st-century workplace skills while working on a robot. They also learn life skills that will never really change no matter what century it is, said Jenschke: teamwork, working on deadline toward a common goal, persevering through intra-personal differences, and, not least, how to raise money to pay for expenses, fundraising.
Among the RoboDogs’ chief financial backers are Genentech, the Vacaville Public Education Foundation, Pacific Gas & Electric, the Solano County Office of Education, the Vacaville Unified School District, and VUSD trustee Whit Whitman.
