St. Tammany News

SLIDELL - Salmen, Northshore and Covington high schools have entered the FIRST competition, a NASA sponsored robotics competition designed to make science as fun as pro sports events.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, started FIRST in 1989 with the intention of fostering interest in the fields of science and technology among America's high school students.

St. Scholastica's Maury Williams (33) goes toward the hoop while being guarded by Salmen's Chelsie James. (Staff Photo by Jacob Brooks)

FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, hosts a robotics competition each year. High school students from around the globe design and build robots to complete specific tasks and take part in an organized game.

These teams are given identical kits, which consist of all the parts necessary to build a robot, the software needed to program the robot and instructions about the requirements of the game.

Last year's game involved student-built robots lifting triangular game pieces and placing them on targets. What sounds like a simple task is made infinitely more difficult considering that these highly specialized robots have to be designed and built by a group of ordinary, cell phone and video game addicted, high school students.

What sets these students apart is their interest in science, technology, mathematics, electrical engineering, computer programming and problem solving, all of which will be put to the test during this competition.

What is more important than all of these interests, according to Kamen, is the ability to work as a team. The credo and guiding principal of the FIRST competition is Gracious Professionalism. Teamwork and gracious professionalism were the main themes at this year's FIRST competition kick off held earlier this month in Manchester, N.H., and simulcast to NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where local high school students found out about this year's game requirements.

"What we see in the game situation is very similar to the situations we see in real life every day," David Throckmorton, deputy director of the Stennis Space Center, said.

The teams intentionally receive too much equipment in their robotics kits, there are too many people on each team and they have too little time to complete the task, Throckmorton said. This forces the teams to think creatively, budget both their time and their resources and make important decisions quickly and effectively while working together every step of the way.

"That's a very realistic scenario," Throckmorton said.

What's even more important than these high school students working together is the fact that they are American.

"If you look at the amount of college graduates in the fields of science and engineering, both the actual numbers and the percentages, European colleges, and specifically Asian countries, are just blowing us away," Throckmorton said. "We need to start graduating more engineers in America if we want to retain our status as a world leader in science and technology."

FIRST intends to engage participating high school students on many different levels and create the foundation for a lifelong interest in engineering. Every participant will be able to contribute something to building the robot, partly because it is such a monumental task.

Team members will have to take what they are given in their kits, figure out what each item is and how they can use it best, design a functioning robot, assemble the robot, work out any kinks in the system, and write computer programs that will instruct the robots to complete very specific tasks.

These finished robots will each have to work as a team and compete in 33 regional competitions leading up to one championship tournament.

This year's game is called Aim High, and it will require three different types of specialized robots.

Aim High takes place on a custom court featuring three goals on each end of the court. Robots will have to be designed to push balls into the two floor-level corner goals, harvest stray balls for continued goal scoring, and accurately shoot balls through the raised center goal.

To aid in goal scoring, the center goal has an illuminated panel above it, which the robots will be able to home in on. A camera system that has the ability to track the green illuminated panel was included in the kit, and each team must decide if they want to build a pusher, harvester, or shooter robot.

In addition to these already difficult tasks, each robot will have to play multiple roles in each game session as the two teams switch from offence to defense and back again.

Faculty members from each school and mentors from the engineering community assist the high school students in the competition. Stennis has provided ten mentors for this year's competition, one of whom will work with the Salmen team.

Michelle Beisler, a liaison for the Stennis rocket propulsion test program for the last four and a half years, will mentor the Salmen team. This is her second competition and the first for Salmen.

"I'll primarily provide organizational skills and assist in some of the technical details," Beisler said.

Ricki Takeshita, an engineer with Lockheed Martin, will mentor Northshore's team. Takeshita said at the kickoff ceremony that his team is both exhilarated and overwhelmed.

"It's amazing that the kits are so small. I expected a huge, 50-pound crate, and we got this tiny little kit," he said.

Pat Edmiston, a math teacher at Covington High School, another Covington faculty member and two Lockheed Martin engineers mentor Covington's team. Edmiston is concerned, however, that they might need more mentors with engineering experience.

"We're looking for more mechanical and electrical engineers to mentor our team," Edmiston said. "Right now Scott Marshall from Lockheed Martin is working with us every day, but if he can't be there we grind to a halt because we need someone with engineering experience there every day."

All three teams will have their work cut out for them in the coming weeks. The teams had just six weeks from Jan. 7 to build their robots from scratch and ship them to the site of the opening competition.

They will have to work together, aim high and use every resource provided to turn their interest in engineering into a functioning robot.

(Individual school teams will be featured in upcoming issues of the St. Tammany News)