Manchester Junior High FTC robotics headed to States, scores in top 10 in World!
submitted by Bodi Foulke, Logan Kippnick, and Jozef Sprunk, FTC youth mentors
The Manchester Junior High FTC robotics team along with our alliance partners won the Michigan South Central Robotics League Tournament this past Saturday for the second year in a row! Wish these defending champs luck as they prepare for the state competition on December 16 and 17.
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 Power Play, was themed around energy.
As always, the matches are played with 4 robots, 2 per alliance. Teams were tasked with building a robot that could place small cones on poles of different heights to score different amounts of points. Alliances who have their corresponding cones on top of the pole at the end of the match earn additional points for possession, adding more competition between alliances. The first 30 seconds of the game is autonomous, meaning robots can only be operated based on pre-programmed instructions. Our robot features an autonomous program that can score cones on two different poles and park in the correct zone based on a randomized vision target. Very few teams in our league had an autonomous program as advanced as ours.
This season is our first in our new robotics facility at the old Nellie Ackerson Building, now called Caife Aspire. We appreciate Joe Walsh donating us space in the building and we look forward to continuing to hang winning banners in our shop!
This year we continued participating in the new league format. Instead of having two separate one-day competitions, one of the competitions was replaced with 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 2nd out of the 35 teams in our league.
One very important aspect of FTC is team judging. This is where the students present themselves and their robot to a panel of judges. This allows teams to still be recognized even if their robot doesn’t match the performance of other teams’, because the robot is only a fraction of a robotics team. The team went in nervous, as this was their second time ever talking to judges, but they did very well. After they finished presenting, the judges were very impressed by the detail within their presentation. The judges then asked them a series of questions, all of which they answered without hesitation, showing their true investment in the program. The judges were wowed with our robot, and even more so with our community outreach.
35 teams competed in the league meet, including teams from schools like Saline, Chelsea, Mason, and Ann Arbor. Our team played extremely well, with no mechanical or programming issues whatsoever. We were able to secure a 5–0 record in qualification matches. After sweeping through the semifinals, the finals were tense as the final outcomes were decided after deliberation between the referees about the rules. It went to a tiebreaker match, which we won after a long debate between the referees. Our alliance scored 216 points, which at the time was the 6th best score in the world and still standing in 9th. The team was super proud of this considering the thousands of teams that compete every year.
“This year’s game was extremely strategic, and the field was even more difficult to navigate,” said Bodi Foulke, crucial youth mentor and drive coach of the team. “This made the job of the driver, operator, human player, and drive coach extremely difficult. A versatile, resilient drive team is what sets apart a good performing team from a great performing team. Our drive team practiced for hours upon hours perfecting our cone placement and time management skills, as well as studying the game and how it is played to look for the best possible strategy. Our practice really shined through on Saturday, going through most matches without dropping a single cone.”
In FIRST events, teams are ranked according to different criteria within the game. At the end of qualifying matches, 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 ended up being the 2nd ranked team. We were worried that we wouldn’t have a shot in the finals since the other three teams building their alliance were Saline teams, which are all high-performing teams due to their access to resources and knowledge. We thought the first-ranked Saline team would choose the next best-performing Saline team, but were ecstatic to find out that they wanted to choose us, and we “gratefully accepted” their offer.
In addition to winning the competition, the team received the Control Award for “mastering robot intelligence.” The award celebrates innovative thinking with a focus on creative programming. “I didn’t think we’d have a shot at it,” said Logan Kippnick, programming mentor of the team. “Bigger teams like Saline have more access to programming resources, so they can make more complex autonomous programs and do more with sensors. After seeing no other teams with a claw mechanism like ours that flips to pick up cones on their side, I can see it. I’m fortunate we have programmers who are interested enough to understand how to turn concept into action.”
The team will head to Calvin University in Grand Rapids to compete in the state competition December 16–17. There we will be joined by our winning alliance partners from Saline and Jackson, along with 69 other teams. In the meantime, we have plenty of little improvements to make to increase our speed and efficiency.
Coming from a small town with an even smaller team, all odds were against us. But through the dedication of our team we continue to defy. “There are double the students within Saline’s school system than in the village of Manchester and we still managed to overcome that adversity and excel” stated Jozef Sprunk, PR and judging mentor. This is the second year this team won the league and the fifth year they have advanced to the state championship. Congratulations, Flying Dutchbots!
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