Middle schoolers ready for world robotics competition in April
By: Krystal Nurse
Tags: Robotics, Schools, Students, Competition, STEM

Middle schoolers ready for world robotics competition in April

Clearview Regional Middle School students Vincent Fox and Drew Angelone and their robotics team, the Dragonators, comprised of 11 other kids, are going to the world’s competition of the FIRST Tech Challenge in April at the Detroit Convention Center in Michigan after winning the Delaware states competition in late January (Krystal Nurse/The Sun).

By KRYSTAL NURSE

The Sun

Following a neck-and-neck win at the state competition in Delaware for the FIRST Tech Challenge competition in late January, Clearview Regional middle schoolers Vincent Fox and Drew Angelone are building up with excitement for the April world competition in Detroit, Mich.

Fox and Angelone are a part of a composite team under South Jersey Robotics, a nonprofit organization that promotes STEM through a robotics program with area children, called the Dragonators who design, build, program and operate robots. Other team members come from Kingsway Regional, Gloucester County Institute of Technology and Logan Township school districts.

“The majority of our teammates go to Kingsway, which is how our colors and team name came out,” said Angelone. “It’s kind of cool because we’re from Clearview and there were people from Logan, GCIT and we’re all representing so many different schools.”

At the competition in January, the duo said its plywood robot had to complete a certain number of tasks to receive points. Some tasks provided more points because of the difficulty.

“For example, we had to use a mechanism to grab minerals and put in the lander,” said Fox. “First, we had intake and we went through trial and error, one didn’t work, so we moved to something else.”

“We tried to do a mineral-sensing program where the robot has to pick out which shape is different and push it away,” said Angelone. “Then we attempted it and ended up using a different program.”

The middle schoolers said the robot was made from scratch, from the programming, to the look of it. They used Google’s Blockly program to tell the robot what to do, based on “if” statements.

“They were basically ‘if’ statements where ‘if this button is pressed, then do this’ and you can make any button and have it change with controllers,” said Angelone.

Teams were also tasked with scouting other teams to pull in members to form an alliance that day, based on perceived skill levels, and those members collaborate together to compete against others to win the tournament, which, in turn, is also a win for the competition.

At the close of states in Delaware, the two said the final winners were decided by one point. They said they competed in Delaware due to the difficulty of New Jersey’s competition. Their team did a run through New Jersey, but didn’t obtain enough points to move forward.

During the Delaware competition, the two said their team was one of the youngest with some teams still having their assigned team numbers in an old format. The older players they teamed up with offered them advice on their robot and acted as mentors to them.

For the Detroit competition, the two hope to improve their robot’s program through trial and error, but realize they will have some difficulty in getting parts on time.

When they transition to the high school, Angelone and Fox said they’re strongly considering the engineering track. Angelone said he’s more focused on the CAD, computer-aided design, and architecture classes, but is worried he could be “too experienced” because the classes build FIRST Lego League robots, which is a step down from the duo’s FTC robot.

Fox, Angelone and the rest of their team are required to raise funds to cover expenses of going to worlds. A verified GoFundMe can be found by visiting GoFundMe.com and searching “Dragonators are Going to the Worlds Competition.”