Lakeside robotics team brings home big wins
New to the robotics game, students on Lakeside Middle School’s Robotics Team have already made a name for themselves across the state.
The team competed at the state BEST — Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology — competition in Little Rock in early November where they won first place against 28 other schools in robot performance, as well as engineering and training.
Their teacher, Stacey Jones, said the team advanced to the championships in Fort Smith where they competed against 30 teams from eight other states and took 12th place. In both competitions, the team was one of only a few middle schools competing.
The team, made up of seventh-graders Meagan Abney, Will Anderson, Riley Cantrell, Clint Cox, Sela Cox, Emerson Foster, Melissa Garcia, Lilly Hardin and Lyla Hill, had six weeks to not only build their robot, but research ways plastics affect ocean life and come up with a solution to clean up pollution. Each process was documented in a notebook.
Jones said the students were dedicated to this afterschool club and competition so much so that they worked most Sunday afternoons as well as the Monday and Friday of Thanksgiving break. This was in addition to their daily after-school work.
The students pulled on their strengths using skills they already had while also honing new skills in the process.
“It’s a holistic approach,” Jones said. “You’ve got the language arts for the research paper. You’ve got the arts, the geography with these ocean garbage
patches. I call it holistic because it covers all disciplines. Math is huge, measurement, the science is huge in it. If they’re talented in one thing, they were able to let it shine.”
According to Clint Cox, students with more artistic abilities sketched out each piece of the robot in order to visualize it before it was built.
“I did the presentation because I’ve been making presentations since about second grade. I used that skill that I already knew,” he said.
Abney said the robot collects pollution, builds reefs in order to reuse the plastic collected, analyzes current flow to relocate animals “so they won’t be in danger of plastics.”
“It’s built so that we can keep wildlife from mistaking plastics for food,” she said.
The robot, according to Sela Cox, was only worth about 15 points of the team’s overall score while the team’s notebook was worth about 30 points. The team also did outreach prior to the competition by providing a simplified presentation for fifth-grade classes in the middle school as well as the school board.
When it came time for the exhibit, Hill said the team had to relate their project to where they are from.
“What we did is we tied in the Ouachita River to it and a map of the rivers leading down to the Gulf of Mexico because whatever is thrown into the rivers will all go to the Gulf of Mexico in some way,” she said. “We even reached out to ADEQ and got their water statistics for our area.”
Moving forward, Jones said the team will move on to the Vex competition with an allnew game and robot built from scratch. The team will compete in Little Rock in January, Arkadelphia and Nashville in February, she said.