Members of Clear Lake High School’s Robotics Club competed recently at VEX Robotics World Championship, the largest robotics competition in the world, held at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. With over 820 teams from around the globe in attendance, the Clear Lake group didn’t come home with the huge trophy but they did score some satisfying wins.
“Worlds went great! They competed in a very tough division and advanced to the division semi finals, where they lost an incredibly close match. It was a great experience for all of them,” said Ryan Bowman, high school Computer Science/Robotics instructor and Robotics coach.
The Robotics Club, named Nice N’ Crispy, is composed of high school juniors Will Faber, Bergen Klaehn, Kaylee Ostrander, Malinda Voortmann and two freshmen students, Jacob Doolittle and Charlie Faber. While Doolittle has only been with the group for the past two years, all the rest have been actively participating in contests since their sixth- grade year.
“So we (the four juniors in the group) all kind of have varying levels of experience. We’ve kind of always had robotics as just an activity we’ve done and we kind of stood out from the start when we were in sixth grade. My first year [2018/2019] we had a team that made it to state. And that’s not unheard of for a brand new sixth grade team to do it. But we’d never had a brand new sixth grade team from Clear Lake do it before,” Klaehn said.
VEX is a high-performance expression language and the robots in question are a metal-based platform with bolt-together pieces, wheels, a motor, and a programmable processor known as the VEX V5 brain. “We have to somehow take all these pieces, organize them and put them together,” Klaehn said. “I serve as the main builder and strategist and so oftentimes my life consists of months straight, sitting in my room until midnight working on a robot…because sometimes to get things built well you just repetitively build and tweak things until they’re good.”
“It’s a huge team effort,” said Klaehn. “We’ll all discuss strategies but Will handles a lot of the programming, he’s really good at that, and I’ll handle a lot of the concepts.”
Besides programming, Will is also one of the robot’s drivers, along with Jacob, while Charlie and Bergen handle strategy and skills. Malinda and Kaylee do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work, such as writing and updating the engineer’s notebook, to team scouting and inter-team communication during competitions, since it is impossible for the driver to see the entire 12-square-foot field, they look out for scoring opportunities and when to play defense.
“A big part of robotics is they want us to learn the engineering design process. So how to build things, how to improve, learn. And then there’s also Judged Awards where you document this process in an engineering notebook that the judges will look at, to tell your engineering story,” Voortmann said.
“As an instructor, it has been quite the honor to have these students in our robotics program. I couldn’t be prouder of these students’ accomplishments this year in both First Tech Challenge and VEX, earning numerous awards and accolades including an FTC Inspire Award, FTC Iowa Control Award, a back-to-back VEX State Championship, a VEX Skills State Championship and the second consecutive appearance at the VEX World Championships. It’s hard to believe all that is packed into one year,” Bowman said.
“These students spend literally hundreds of hours throughout the year designing, building and programming their robots. Alongside that, they constantly are doing community outreach to spread awareness of robotics/STEM and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. They are awesome representatives of Clear Lake everywhere they go,” Bowman continued. “A big thank you goes to the wonderful Clear Lake community, for all the support you give to these kids throughout the year. Without your support and business sponsorships, none of this would be possible!”
