Added on December 13, 2021 Sara Swanson

The Flying Dutchbots advancing to states!

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The team and our mentors: Back, from left, Matt Sprunk (mentor); Jake Vershum (mentor); Jozef Sprunk (mentor); Bodi Foulke; Logan Kippnick (mentor), Emerson Martin; Liam Pierce; Middle, left: Sophia Runde; Carl Casey; Front row, kneeling, Coach Mark West. Not pictured: Andy Galicki (mentor and videographer).

submitted by FIRST Robotics Team 11193, the Flying Dutchbots

The Manchester Junior High FTC robotics team along with our alliance partners won the South Central Michigan Robotics League Tournament on Saturday. We are on our way to the State Championship in Battle Creek this coming Friday and Saturday!

Our robotics team is part of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding knowledge and practical uses of STEM to students through a challenging game. This year’s game for the middle school branch, First Tech Challenge or FTC, called Freight Frenzy, was centered around transportation.

As always, it is played with 4 robots, 2 per alliance. Teams were tasked with building a robot that could transport “freight” from an area called the Warehouse to different places on the field to score points, most notably a wobbling tower with three different “shelves” onto which freight can be placed, scoring different amounts of points. The first 30 seconds of the game is autonomous, meaning robots can only be operated based on pre-programmed instructions. Our robot features 5 autonomous programs of various complexity to allow our robot to accommodate our alliance partners’ autonomous programs as best as possible. Our biggest challenge was making sure the robot would position itself consistently in order to complete all the tasks we wanted to to maximize points.

This season has been particularly challenging for us because we only have four students on our team roster, but they are all incredibly dedicated and have become very knowledgeable about our team and the different parts of the robot.

This year we chose to participate in a league format instead of having two separate competitions, where teams in the league participate in meets that consist of only qualification matches, followed by one official tournament championship with all of the league teams, which contains more qualification matches and then a playoff bracket. This allowed us to play more matches and better solidify the operations of our robot. At the end of the meets we were ranked 7th out of the 30 teams in our league.

One very important aspect of FTC is called judging. This is when the team presents themselves to a panel of judges. This allows teams to still be recognized even if a team’s robot doesn’t match the performance of other teams’, because the robot is only a fraction of a robotics team. The team went in very nervous, as this was their first ever time talking to judges, but they did very well. After they finished presenting, the judges told them to relax because they were impressed by their presentation. The judges then asked them a series of questions, all of which they answered very well. The judges were very impressed with the design of our robot and enjoyed its Mario theme, as the students saw a resemblance in the design of the robot to Bowser.

Logan Kippnick, programming mentor and high school robotics team member, stated, “The four of them did a truly amazing job explaining our team and our robot’s design and functions. I was chosen as the mentor to go in with them, so I witnessed them absolutely blow the judges away. They even piqued their interest so much that a group of them watched our robot specifically for one of our matches. We were very confident that we were in a good place to win an award for our robot.”

Thirty teams competed in the qualification matches. Our team played well, and although we experienced issues, we were able to work as a team and overcome them for a 3 win/ 2 lose record. We ranked 8th at the end of qualification.

Drive coach, mentor, and high school robotics team member, Jozef Sprunk stated, “Our season started out a little rocky without much drive practice, but as the season progressed, our drive team improved drastically and began to feel more confident in their abilities. I was impressed by the team’s ability to adapt and overcome when our game plan fell apart. I feel our knowledge has grown greatly through our challenges and become overall a more rounded team.”

In FIRST events, teams are ranked according to different criteria within the game. At the end of qualifying, the top 4 teams use “scouting” information that they have collected throughout the event to select two other teams and draft their ideal playoff alliances, middle school dodgeball style. Playoff matches are decided in a best two out of three match format.

We were chosen by the 3rd ranked alliance, consisting of FTC teams 11617 Chelsea Glitch, and 11729 Chelsea Crash, both from Beach Middle School. Our alliance was able to win our semifinal with ease with a 2-0 record

Due to various connection issues in the finals, there was a lot of suspense as the officials talked about replaying the match that we had won. They chose not to and we moved on to the second match. Even more tension was created when our robot failed to connect for the first minute or so. We were all very worried because our robot was blocking our alliance partner from being able to score. Our drive team was able to successfully troubleshoot the issue and get the robot back up and running, and we ended up winning the match, and with that, the event overall!

We received the Collins Aerospace Innovate Award. The Collins Aerospace Innovate Award celebrates a team that “thinks outside the box and has the ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their designs come to life.” This judged award is given to the team that has “the most innovative and creative robot design solution to any specific components in the FIRST Tech Challenge game.” Elements of this award include “elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to design.” The creative component must work consistently, but a robot does not have to work all the time during matches to be considered for this award.

Next week, the team heads to Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek to compete in the state competition. There we will be joined by our winning alliance partners from Chelsea. In the meantime, we have plenty of little improvements to make.

We’re really hoping that this event will help us become closer to our neighboring teams from Chelsea. They were all very friendly and fun to work with and we think it would be helpful for all of our teams if we could collaborate throughout future build seasons.

With a small town and an even smaller team, all odds were against us. But through the dedication of our small team we managed to defy. This is the fourth year this team has advanced to the state competition.

Daniella Kippnick, middle school team consultant and high school team assistant coach stated, “These kids are a small but mighty team. Four found themselves to be truly dedicated to what robotics takes. When I came in to help prep them for the detailed questions of judging, I was blown away with how much this new team had learned and absorbed. Robotics here in Manchester continues to have a bright future with these kids. Thanks to all that have supported and those that will continue to help support this opportunity and growth.”