Edina Students Crafting More than Robots

It would be enough for a group of teenagers to design and build a robot with a double-jointed motorized arm and pneumatic claw along with a minibot capable of scaling a 10-foot pole and triggering a sensor at the top, as ’s robotics team The Green Machine did this year. And yet, The Green Machine is so much more than that.

Going beyond competitive robotics, the team participates in outreach events year round, mentors younger students, maintains an award-winning website in addition to an online presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and raises some $35,000 a year.

The Green Machine competes in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, dubbed “the varsity sport for the mind.” More precisely, it's a high school robotics competition that reaches nine countries and involves more than 2,000 teams.

Founded in 1989 by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST aims to generate excitement about science and technology and inspire young people to pursue careers in those areas. It offers programs for elementary through high school students. 

This year, The Green Machine competed in two regional competitions that drew robotics teams from all over the Midwest: the Lake Superior Regional in Duluth and the North Star Regional in Minneapolis. The team won Best Website at both competitions and won the Engineering Inspiration award in Duluth. Those accolades qualified the team for the world championship in St. Louis at the end of April, where they placed 53rd out of 88 in their division. 

Surprising Outcomes 

Dean Kamen’s goal of inspiring students to pursue science and technology worked on junior Michael Woolsey, The Green Machine’s co-captain. Woolsey initially joined up to get some marketing experience, but was asked to sit on the build team as well. 

“Next year I’m going to be the captain and I plan on going to college for engineering, so it’s totally changed everything," Woolsey said. "I thought I was going to be the only person on the team doing marketing and now it’s like ‘I want to be an engineer. What was I thinking?’ It’s been a pretty big deal.”

Emily Condiff, a senior and safety captain for the team, has a longer history with FIRST. Her involvement with The Green Machine went in a different direction than she had originally anticipated as well, building off of experience with FIRST LEGO League teams in another school district.

“I hadn’t really done robotics," Condiff said. "I moved a lot, and so when I came here I heard that they had an FTC team and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I kind of want to check it out, maybe do some of the writing for the website. I was kind of interested in learning programming and I was put on the build sub-team as well for building the robot.”

Mark Lawrence, The Green Machine’s operations director, has been with the team since its inception in 2006. His sister, who was working for FIRST as the operations director of the Upper Midwest, called him and said there was someone in Edina who wanted to start a team. 

“So I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go figure this out,’ and the rest is history,” Lawrence said. 

The team went all the way to the championships its first year and it has seen success every year since. If The Green Machine surprises you, know that it surprised its members just as much. 

“It was way more fun than I thought it would be and now I’m captain and probably going to college for [engineering],” Woolsey said.

During the six-week build season, it’s not uncommon for students to stay at school until 9 p.m. working on the robot. And even when the competition season ends, there’s still plenty of work to do in other arenas like outreach and fundraising. Those outside the robotics team might wonder why a group of teenagers—30 of them this year, and they’re hoping to double their numbers next year—would choose to volunteer so much of their free time to something that sounds like schoolwork. 

“People might think that we’re really nerdy or something, but it’s really a lot of fun," said senior Clara Lee, a CAD designer for the team. "I was laughing a ton on the team all the time. Even if you’re not on the build team, you always have a lot of stuff to do, which is not always math-y or science-y.”

Woolsey agreed. 

“It’s never busy work. You’re actually able to do something and then see it work and have progress—and it’s a lot of fun too," he said. "It’s way better than just learning things; you’re actually doing things.”

What Local Businesses Can Do

Want to help The Green Machine keep up its momentum? Competitive robotics is an expensive endeavor. With entry fees of $5,000 for each competition plus travel and equipment expenses, The Green Machine needs to raise some $35,000 per year. All the fundraising is done by the students, and current sponsors include companies such as Medtronic and Ecolab.

“It’s a ton of money to be able to do this, so we’re always looking for new sponsors, especially in the community," Woolsey said. "We really like representing Edina companies.”