BHS Robotix Club Prepares for 2011 First Competition

There’s a light burning at rather late these days. Long after the teachers have left their classrooms, the school’s athletes have all showered and left, and even the school’s principal has cleared his desk and headed home, there is a group of dedicated students toiling into the evening. Six days a week, from January through February, the Burlington High School Robotix Team is hard at work building a dream. 

The Robotix team is preparing for their third FIRST competition. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a culture in which leaders in science and technology are celebrated and rewarded.  FIRST is the brain child of inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, and the organization believes that creating opportunities for science and technology students to compete in exciting team events will help create the technology leaders of the future.

The BHS Robotix Club, dubbed the Devil Botz, includes 20 students, 2 advisors and 6 parent-mentors. The advisors are BHS math teacher Ashad Khan and Phil Vachon a former BHS teacher who currently teaches engineering at Doherty Middle School in Andover.  

 The team received its FIRST challenge on January 8, 2011 and has until February 22, 2011 to ship its completed robot to the competition.  Last year the team’s challenge was to build a robot that could play soccer. The robot had to move across the field of play and be able to manage the ball, kick and score goals.

Selectman Walter Zenkin attended the FIRST competition last year and was very impressed.

“It was a very exciting event,” said Zenkin.  There were over 15,000 attendees and teams from as far away as Australia.  There were also scouts from many elite engineering schools. It’s a great program,” he enthused.

In 2010, the Devil Botz brought home the Imagery Award for the outstanding integration of art in engineering, an award dedicated to illustrator Jack Kamen, the father of FIRST founder Dean Kamen.

This year’s challenge is to develop a robot that will retrieve pieces of aluminum tubing scattered across a field and arrange the pieces on a wall in the design of the FIRST logo. 

The Robotix Club is run much like a small company with teams working on various parts of the project.  There is a programming team, a chassis team, a group working solely on the robotic arm, and more.

“What’s great about this program is that the team runs like a company with a CEO, designers and engineers. It’s a great way for kids to learn how companies work,” added Zenkin.

The Robotix Club does all its own fundraising because, unlike sports teams, the Devil Botz get no funding from the School Department. Students and their mentors work to raise the necessary funds from local organizations such as PTC, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, the U.S. Army and the Burlington Education Foundation. Other local businesses such as , , , Flatbread and , help out by providing free meals for the hard working students who are often at BHS long past dinner time and nearly all day on Saturday.

Club president Zill Patel pointed out that even students who are not pursuing a career in engineering can benefit from this program.

“I learned a lot about business and public relations because part of my job with the club is to make fund-raising presentations to local businesses," said Patel.

Selectman Zenkin added that in the future, he would like to see the Robotix Club funded at least partially by the School Department.

“This is another avenue for scholarships. It’s not only about sports, arts or theater. It’s also about technology,” he said.

The FIRST competition is unique in that it encourages cooperation between competing teams.  Coining the phrase “coopritition,” FIRST teams are awarded points for assisting one another. The FIRST philosophy is that through coopertition and gracious professionalism, teams can compete fiercely but still treat opponents with respect, integrity and sensitivity.

“Our robotics team is an impressive group of students who dedicate an amazing amount of their free time preparing for the FIRST competition,” said Principal Patrick Larkin.

The Devil Botz have volunteered to mentor a younger group of scholars and they hope that a junior robotics club will soon be formed at the elementary school level here in Burlington.

The Devil Botz will compete at the FIRST event held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on March 10-12, 2011 and again at Boston University on April 7-9, 2011.  For more information, visit the BHS Devil Botz at www.bhsrobotix.com or www.usfirst.org.