MNHS Robotics Club is unique at FTC Rookies Qualifier

As the only all-female team at the Pennsylvania First Tech Challenge (FTC) "Rookies Qualifier," the Marple Newtown "RoboChicks" stood out. Many STEM related contests and fields tend to be more male-dominated, and this one was no exception.

Members of the Marple Newtown High School Robotics Club competed on Saturday, January 11, at Owen J. Roberts High School in Pottstown. The FTC is a program for high school students who design, build and program robots with autonomous and driver controlled modes. Saturday’s tournament was only for newly formed teams. Under the mentorship of MNHS chemistry teacher Mr. Donald Sloat, and engineering and video production teacher Jessica Buechele, an all girl team made up of Leia Chung, Bethany Hadden, Gabriella Maiorano, captain Mary Montgomery, Sarah Rote, and Rachel Seo competed for the first time with their robot identified by the number "7888."

Fellow MN Robotics Team 5862 members, especially by Bowen Sjolander and Sahil Bhanderi had contributed technical help along the way as the rookie RoboChicks built and programmed their robot with Tetrix ®parts and practiced controlling their robot on a playing field constructed by Kyle Davis and other members of Team 5862.  Robotics club members Bowen Sjolander, Ben Sjolander and Kyle Davis were there Saturday to cheer them on at their team's debut and witness their team’s successes.

     “The RoboChicks deserve accolades for their great accomplishments at the Rookie Competition held at Owen J. Roberts High School Saturday,” said Mr. Sloat after the tournament.    After being interviewed by judges on the process of designing, building, programming and documenting their progress in an engineering notebook, Team 7888 composed of Leia Chung, Bethany Hadden, Gabriella Maiorano, Mary Montgomery, Sarah Rote, and Rachel Seo had placed 5th out of the 21 teams that showed up for the competition.  For a number of reasons including late completion of the robot itself, the robot had not been programmed to operate in autonomous mode in which the robot was to drive itself up a ramp and park within the first 30 seconds of each match.  Nevertheless, after their first two robot alliances won their matches against competing alliances, Team 7888 temporarily lead the field in first place. When their last robot alliances lost their last matches to stronger opponent alliances, the team still ranked overall as 13th among a field of 21 teams. During the awards ceremony it was announced that Team 7888 was nominated for the FTC Motivate Award.  “Jess and I are thrilled that the accomplishments of these young ladies are being recognized,” said Mr. Sloat.

As Robin Shoop, CEO of Robomatter, Inc. says, “Today’s teachers are teaching in an era of exponential change. Can you remember your Palm Pilot? Pagers? Zip Drives? VHS Tapes? Cassette Tapes? The list of obsolete technologies from the 90’s goes on and on. If we only focus on teaching specific technologies, we are doing our kids a disservice because that technology may not exist by the time that they reach the workplace. However, if we teach them how to think and organize, and how to treat others, these skills never go out of date. We need to teach students process and 21st century communication skills; how to think algorithmically, how to design, how to engineer, how to cooperate and collaborate as members of teams, and robotics engineering can help teach those skills.”

The robotics club was formed last year at MNHS. It is currently looking for sponsors to help support the expansion of the program at Marple Newtown High School.  

Last year there was one female participant, this year, with expanded funding, MNHS has a team of six young ladies; last year MN Robotics had just nine guys, this year, with expanded funding, MNHS has nineteen young men.  Sponsor funding is critical to expand the program so that the number of teams that can be fielded can be expanded so that more students could have the experiences of building, programming, testing and competing with 21st century technology.  Besides participation in the FTC competitions, with sufficient expanded funding more students could become involved by building and entering Vex® kit robots in REC scheduled competitions.

Interested prospective sponsor support will be acknowledged in a variety of meaningful ways.  Corporate and business sponsors as well as individual donors can write a check to help extend the MN Robotics program by making it payable to the "MNSD Student Activity Fund", and mailing it to: MNHS Robotics, c/o Business Office, Marple Newtown School District, 46 Media Line Road, Newtown Square PA 19073.