Manchester Students Win OCC Robotics Competition

(Photos by Joseph Gawlik/Footprints Photography and Video)

Ten students from Manchester Township High School’s Engineering Technology program put their lessons to work and beat out teams from around Ocean County to win Ocean County College’s Annual Robotics competition last week.

Competing in pairs, the Hawks’ five teams -- R2-D2, Grimlock, Hawk 1, A-1, and Optimus Prime -- managed to bring home two first-place finishes and a third place in the event on Dec. 3. The victories earned the students $2,250 in scholarship money.

The students competed in two contests, designing and building their Lego mindstorm robots.

In the first competition, teams designed, built, and tested a robotic racer with the components found in their mindstorm kits. The distance for the race is two laps, and all runs were timed with a stopwatch.

In the second competition, students and their teams had one hour to design, build, and program a robotics device to accomplish a specified task. The Hawks’ specified task was to design a robot to follow a curved path; however the obstacle was that two teams’ robots were on either end of the path, meaning they would collide at some point. The robots were designed for speed, because the team whose robot made it farthest on the path won.

Technology Department coordinator Joseph Gawlik said the students prepared for the competition for a month.

“My students worked very hard to accomplish the task at hand,” he said. In the end, “It was a case of David beating Goliath.”

“Thinking outside the box was the key to success,” he said. “A simple small and fast design was the goal from the outset.”