Robotics competition heats up Belmont High School

BELMONT — Technology took over the Belmont High School gym on Saturday when 36 teams competed at the VEX Robotics Frostbite Qualifier to battle it out with robots of their own making.

Students had worked on their machines for months, and Saturday was the chance to put their work to the test in live competition.

It was the third year Belmont had hosted the event, which the school uses as a revenue source to support its robotics teams.

There were as many engineering techniques on display as there were schools in attendance, and each robot harbored different features to make them stand out and perform the necessary tasks. Adrien Deshaies, advisor of the three Belmont robotics teams, said some teams had been working on their robots since early April of this year, while other teams started in mid-September, but they all have worked hard to get them ready for the big day.

“They’re learning everything from the design process and engineering to problem-solving skills,” Deshaies said. “Once they actually design something they have to test it, see if it works, refine it. That’s not including all the programing skills they end up learning as well.”

Even after all that, the competition can throw the students curveballs.

“Things break, they have to problem solve on the fly. Their first event is chaotic, but it’s a huge learning experience,” said Deshaies.

A big part of the learning experience at competitions is seeing what other teams have done.

“Each team has a different approach to the game and comes up with different ideas,” Deshaies said. “It’s kind of an eye-opener to see how other teams have solved the problem.”

Because, as different as the robots may be, they were all designed to meet the same objective.

Each team on Saturday built one robot and performed for the right to advance to the state competitions. Teams were randomly assigned partner teams – creating alliances – to compete against other such partnerships in preliminary rounds. The goal was to score points by using robots to pick up small cubes and place the cubes in designated goal zones. The more cubes in a zone, the more points teams racked up.

The students are also learning teamwork, and have to coordinate with their partners. “That kind of makes it interesting because you’re teaming up with a different robot every time,” Deshaies said. “There’s a lot of collaboration behind the scenes before the match even begins, so they can maximize what they can do.”

Except for a sprinkling of middle school teams, most squads were made up of high schoolers. Two high school students from Kennett High School, Chani Mores and Kate Keefe of North Conway started building their robot in September, but their work went back a lot farther than that. “We started out as scared freshmen, but we stuck with it and have been competing ever since,” Mores said.

The pair have come a long way since then. They’ve been to the VEX World Championships twice and have a passion for robotics. The girls 3D-printed parts of their robot, and have worked hard to perfect it. After high school, they plan on pursuing careers that include computer science and software engineering.

While Mores and Keefe were veterans of the robotic wars, several teams were made up of students who were just starting out on their journey. Ninth graders Kieran McCurdy and Malcom George of Spark Academy, in Manchester, worked for two or three months to perfect their robots’ defensive skills. “Our robot is a purely defensive robot that can block enemies from scoring and picking up blocks,” George said. “Its defensive tactic is what makes it unique.”

One of the other things unique is the names given to individual robots.

They included the Belmont entry “Sad Habenero,” the Thetford (Vt.) Academy robot “Beefcake” – whose operator always wears a Hawaiian shirt – and “Sonic Mule” from Trinity High School in Manchester, which took home the tournament’s excellence award.

“The names of the robots sometimes are the best part,” said Deschaies, who is hoping to get his school’s entries to qualify for the state competition in February.

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Staff writer Roger Carroll contributed to this story.