Manchester Township School District: Manchester Middle School Team Wins OCC Robotic Race

Press release from the Manchester Township School District:

2021-05-06

Designing and building a robot via Zoom during a pandemic is not an easy task, but a team of students from Manchester Township Middle School made it work, taking first place in the middle school division of the 2020 Ocean County College Tech Prep Virtual Robotic Race. Their coach, Mrs. Maura Simister, was named Middle School Robotic Coach of the Year.

Team members Gabe Calafati (Captain-gr. 7), Sean Ascione (gr. 7), Marcos Gaspar (gr. 7), and Justin Deleon (gr. 6) accomplished the required task of making their robot follow a black line while carrying a ball.  They described their process and struggles in a required presentation board and submitted videos of their coding and design process as well as video of the robot in action. 

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Neil Schiller, Engineering Program Chair at Ocean County College, congratulated the team and Mrs. Simister in a letter. He said that Mrs. Simister was chosen as coach of the year for the extreme lengths she went to in order to allow her students to compete in a remote and mixed learning environment. “Your efforts included picking up, sanitizing the robot parts, and moving them from one student to another, in addition to coaching your teams,” he said. “Your willingness to do this demonstrates your dedication to your students, as well as your ability as a coach.”

Below is the team’s presentation describing their process.

The objective of the 2020 TechPrep competition is to program a robot to perform different tasks. You need the robot to follow a black line while carrying a ball to complete the full segment. This will be daring because it is a struggle to get parts from the school. One challenge we had to face last year was getting the code. So I think we should put more time towards that this year. We had many communication problems because of the pandemic. We couldn’t meet, talk, or build in person.  Instead we had to host zoom meetings after school. 

We realized we must use some type of claw or forklift mechanism to carry the ball. So we searched for different  designs we can build with the materials we have. There were  many different choices we found. Most of these options were found by watching different tutorials and YouTube videos. We used these as inspiration towards our design. You can’t forget about the most important part! The wheels! We’d need a stable way to move around because of the lifting mechanism. 

Our group found many different solutions to our problem. We could go with a claw approach where the robot  would scoop up the ball. Or a lift idea where the robot would  scoop under and pick up.Those were the two main designs we thought of. 

We chose for our robot to have a lift at the front since a  scoop or claw would be too complex. The lift was just two easy  motions. We decided to use track for the wheels for stable  driving. Soon we would start building our amazing design. 

For the lifting mechanism, we used a special type of motor that is different than the one used for the wheels.  When spun, it activates a gear that will allow it to lift up and  down. For the wheels we used a tank like tire to connect the two wheels on each side. This allowed us to only use two motors as the back wheel will now rely on the front wheel to move since they are attached. 

We had to go through many series of testing to get a functionable robot. The structure of the robot didn’t need much testing. It was the code we needed to see. We had to use our spare time to test the robot and its code. We were using one of his codes but it didn’t seem to work. On zoom we watched the robot stop moving and working. 

We talked over zoom about making new codes and solutions. We told Justin he’d need to make a new code  from scratch. He started making a new code slowly but surely the robot started working! Just in time before the competition. 

We just had to do a few finishing touches of the robot. We also had to film the robot in action. Sean was in charge of documenting the presentation and sending it to Mrs. Simister. I used IMovie on IPhone to edit the video. 

This press release was produced by the Manchester Township School District. The views expressed here are the author’s own.