Beverly students win top prize in world robotics competition
A Beverly school robotics team is ending its high school chapter with a prestigious world robotics competition prize in hand.
Wolfpack Machina, the varsity robotics team at the Waring School, recently won the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship Inspire Award, which is the competition’s top honor and recognizes excellence in robot design and teamwork. The team at the coed private middle and high school also attained the highest offensive power ranking (OPR) in the world, and won its divisional championship and the divisional Inspire Award at the competition.
The team, made up of 11 seniors and one junior, includes Thomas Davis, Alma Power, Olga Gadmer Langman, Owen Cooper, Chris Douglas, Olive Sauder, Amelia Wyler, Charlie Pound, Kaden Cassidy, Collin Keegan, Peter Hannah, and Owen Reimold.
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, is an international organization for students ages 4-18 who are involved in mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, while promoting self-confidence, communication, and leadership. The FIRST Championship, an annual competition, was held in Houston this year.
Each year, FTC teams build and program a robot no larger than 18 in any dimension. At the competition, the robots play against each other in matches that change every year. This year’s challenge was to pick up cones and score by placing them on various poles.
Wolfpack Machina was one of four Massachusetts FTC teams to compete at the world competition. The team wowed the judges with a 15-page summary of its work, a strong robot performance, and an interview about their robot’s design, testing, code, as well as its outreach efforts and work with STEM experts.
Its outreach initiatives are an effort to bring opportunities to underserved communities, Douglas said. The team worked with Everett Public School STEM director Rupi Kaur, as well as the superintendent, to launch five FLL teams in Everett. They paid the fees and robot costs for those teams, trained the coaches, and attended practices to work directly with team members.
The team also established 35 FIRST Lego League (FLL) teams in Rwanda after Wyler moved there during her fall 2022 semester. She worked with UNESCO, the Rwanda government, and other partners to get Rwandan FLL recognized by FIRST as its own FLL region. In March, Rwanda held its first FLL Championship, which Wyler organized. There were over 700 attendees, including several cabinet ministers from Rwanda and Botswana.
“It would not have worked if Amelia had not moved to Rwanda to do this personally,” said team coach Francis Schaeffer. “This was every day, all day for a semester at least, plus lots of work when she came back to make sure that the national championship would come off.”
Schaeffer, chair of the Science, Engineering, and Technology Department at Waring, founded the FTC team in 2020, three years after he helped found Waring’s FLL team, the Brickwolves, which qualified for the FIRST World Championship two years in a row and had the highest scoring robot game in the world in the 2019-2020 season. Almost all of the members of Wolfpack Machina were previously on the FLL team.
Winning the Inspire Award is a culmination of the outreach they’ve worked on since they began working as a team, Gadmer Langman said.
“It’s incredibly rewarding because it wasn’t even the work we put in this year. It’s the work we’ve put in and the time we spent together for the past six years,” Gadmer Langman added.
Soon, the team members will be graduating high school. Some plan to attend an engineering school or take a gap year to work on the project in Rwanda.
“It’s really something to watch a kid go from being 12 and figure something out that you really understand and you can teach them to them being an expert to the level where I do not understand what they’re doing anymore,” Schaeffer said.