Robots invade Durant High School, team makes progress

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Robots are taking over at Durant High School. Students not only can take a robotics class, but also can participate in various competitions throughout the school year featuring robots they have built.

“Robotics class teaches me to think outside the box and figure out different ways to solve something,” said student Drake Roach.

Seven Durant High School students chose to take robotics this school year during the second semester. In the class, students work on different robots — even some from previous competitions. The students learn how to structurally build robots out of individual pieces, as well as code the robot to perform different tasks.

Funded by Inteletec, giving $10,000, the class started out as an engineering course. For the first year, the class was focused mostly on teaching spreadsheets and tasks — no robots. Now in its fourth year, Joey Kramer teaches the class in two semesters, starting with direct teaching —the basics and parts of the robots. Knowing what a robot sees, learning how it moves and going over robot sensors takes up the first semester of learning.

“Normally it takes one to two class periods to build the robot, and when I get it to the design I want, I work on coding,” said Roach.

The second semester of robotics includes seven to eight daylong projects. Each project normally lasts three weeks. During this semester, Kramer introduces the students to programming and lets the students build their own robots with less instruction. Students take apart previous robots and rebuild them to perform different task via coding. Kramer uses old competition scorers during classroom competitions, and the student with the highest score receives a treat.

“He (Kramer) gives us challenges to figure out. He let’s us try to figure it out ourselves first,” said student Logan Wolf.

The robotics class equips students with a variety of life-long skills, one of which is problem solving. Kramer said, at the end of the day when something didn’t work like the students thought, they have to rethink their design to figure out what the robot will look like next.

“Some students are interested in engineering. Some just think robots are cool. Some want to learn coding. It’s across the board,” Kramer explained of the students that elect to take the robotics class.

Robotics is an elected credit course students can choose to take. After building their robots, students use a computer to code different tasks that are directed to the robot via Bluetooth: lifting up a block, parking in a designated area, navigating a course, etc. Grading throughout the class is based upon problem solving skills and a cumulative report of life skills learned throughout the course.

At the end of the course, students compare their starting robot to their end design. They are given a rubric that Kramer grades based on a thorough description of problems they encountered and solutions, a walk through of how their codes work, and a summary of how the students can use the learning in the future.

“I don’t give them all the solutions, that is part of the class. I need them to figure out what didn’t work and figure out how to solve it,” explained Kramer.

The Durant robotics class has just recently been opened to include students from Wilton with an interest in robots and coding. The Wilton students are shuttled over to the high school during class time to work right alongside the Durant students. There are currently two Wilton students who make the trip to Durant High School weekly.

Going into its sixth year, Kramer has led a team of kids to various competitions that showcase their hand-built team robot performing different tasks. Four high school students currently attend the competitions, practicing during seminar times, study hall blocks and at 7 a.m. Wednesday mornings.

Competition practice starts right away in August with the first competition guidelines being released in September. Kramer received a grant from the state of Iowa to help jump-start their ability to attend competitions. The grant gave the kids a competition field, all parts of the robot and school laptops used for coding. From October to January, the kids attend four competitions that pair two teams against each other. During one competition, the scorekeeper keeps track of points accumulated throughout the game — based on different coding tasks — and the team with the highest accumulative score wins.

The competition (the game) takes place on a 12-by-12 foot field with a soft foam mat floor. Two alliances are paired against each other. With their robots in place, both teams complete three different periods during the game: 30-second autonomous period, two-minute driver controlled period; and a 30-second end game.

During the autonomous period, the robots operate on pre-programmed instructions and sensors only. The robots perform different tasks in those 30 seconds: picking up and delivering stones to designated areas and navigating under a bridge.

The two-minute driver-controlled period allows the students to control their robots in real time. The kids have to move the robot to pick up and place stones on top of each other, making a skyscraper without falling over.

The final period during the competition is the end game. In this driver-controlled period, the team has to place a team capper on top of their skyscraper and park their robot in a designated building site. During each period of the game, students accumulate points based on the completion of each described task.

Recently, the Durant Robotics Team went to Qualifiers where the team placed fourth over all. Because of their placement, the team went on to Super Qualifiers Feb. 15 at Regina High School in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the season stopped there for the Durant team. If advanced, the team would have moved on to State Qualifiers followed by World Qualifiers, originally set in Detroit or Chicago at the end of April.

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