The BFA Robotics Club recently competed in their yearly state competition on Saturday, the 8th of February where they displayed the product of their months of work.
The Robotics Club starts meeting at the beginning of the school year, meeting for around an hour and a half in the morning once a week. The club members started to meet more when the competition was upcoming. The week before the competition, they all stayed after school until 8 pm every day, and even came in on the snow day to work on the robot.
Jacob Kittell said that the week before the competition was a “37-hour week”. Kittell said, “I didn’t have a snow day”, because he spent a total of 37 hours of his free time working on the robot, including coming into school on the snow day that the rest of the school got off.
Jacob was the lead for the entire project, while also designing the arm of the robot. He delegated the design of the claw to Will Massey and the entirety of the coding to Miles Philips.
Miles was part of the group that pulled a 37-hour work week. He was primarily coding the whole time, but mentioned that while “waiting for everyone else to finish, I helped other groups”, because he could only code the parts as the other groups made progress. He also led the testing of the robot because he was the only one who knew how to operate the code in order to test it.
Will mainly worked on the claw of the robot. The claws on these robots are different from the arms because the arms move the claws around while the claws grab objects for tasks in the competition. These need to work hand in hand in order to score well. Will mentioned that the robot was doing extremely well in test runs, but at the competition, everything went wrong. He said, “The battery died at 30%… and the arm fell off”. These major setbacks were solved with the time they were given to patch the issues. Our BFA Robotics team placed 19th out of 21 teams in the state, which has been a normal result in the past few years according to Will and Jacob. Hopefully, with the dedication and skills of these BFA students, next year’s competition will land us a better placement.