Nintendo’s Mario and Yoshi took on a new life at Pace High’s robotics team, winning first place in this year's Emerald Coast BEST Robotics Competition.
Saturday, students from Pace High School competed against other high schools, middle schools, and home school groups to prove who had the best unmanned mining operation in the region to retrieve coal, iron, aluminum, copper, and lithium from a mine too dangerous for people to enter. These commodities may have been pieces of foam, PVC pipe, and toilet paper rolls, but the robots the students built were real as well as the challenge.
Four teams at a time negotiated obstacles, retrieved objects in various locations, and returned them to a scoring position on a 24 foot by 24 foot carpeted field. Each team played through four 5’x8’ sections, or the levels of the mine. Each mine was a team’s own territory while a section in the middle of the field contained the most valuable items.
Kelsey Womack, Pace High teacher, was the team’s supervisor. She said as far as she knew, her team was the only one with a detachable sub assembly, a sort of trailer. Lacey Littleton was in her 4th year of competing with Pace and was the captain of the build team as well as one of the drivers. She said the idea to have a detachable component really came from the whole group.
Womack said while other teams may have been able to collect one or two items, the Pace team would have a whole bucket to fill and then empty in the score area. Littleton said the team would be able to make fewer trips and so have more time.
The Pace team went with a Nintendo’s Mario theme. In the Mario games, he controls his dinosaur steed, Yoshi, and so in the competition, the drivers were Mario while the robot was Yoshi. The students decorated their robot to look like the lizard, complete with green paint and big eyes.
Littleton said each team needs to have five drivers, so more students get a feel for handling their creation. The driver uses a remote resembling a videogame controller programmed, in this case, to move Yoshi, turn him, operate the hook in the rear attaching the trailer, turn his head, and open his mouth.
The booth team was also painted like a level from a Mario game. Those stopping by the booth could not only learn about the robot from a pamphlet but get the chance to play a game of Mario on a Nintendo Wii at the booth. All booth team members said their's seemed to be the most popular with students from other teams at times lining up out the door. The interior walls of the booth were painted black with sparse lighting, ideal for the television screen.
While Pace's Yoshi scored the most points, Womack said, “There are another 25 kids working every day on other stuff.” The other teams included a spirit team, booth, presentation, marketing, and website. She said the team combined the notebook and photography teams to be a “paparazzi team.”
Womack said, “We’re building a company from the ground up in 42 days. That's the challenge.” The entire team acted as a company, she said, not only completing the task at hand, but selling themselves as well. “It’s like starting a business.”
Littleton said being involved in this competition was right in line with her career goals of working in the aerospace industry at Jet Propulsion Labs in California. Loarann Hinson, captain of the entire team and also involved for four years said she’s hoping to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency known as DARPA.
For more details on the Pace robotics team, visit their website at pacerobotics.weebly.com.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Pace wins 2015 Emerald Coast BEST Robotics Competition