Robotics class earns awards
GRAVETTE — Students in Dorothy Hadley’s third- through fifth-grade robotics class are enthusiastic about their teams. They are so involved in the extracurricular activity that they come in to her classroom before school four days a week and stay after school two days, Tuesday and Thursday. In addition to meeting before and after school, team members meet Monday through Thursday during WIN (What I Need) time. They’ve been even more faithful to show up after participating in a recent competition where they brought home two first-place trophies and a second-place award.
Two teams from Gravette Upper Elementary, a girls’ team and a boys’ team, competed at Harrison Feb. 9. The girls’ team calls itself the Sensational Six. Team members include Allie Cook, Daniela Arizmendi, Ali Grotts and Alyn Rueda. They didn’t win any awards at the competition because their robotic kits didn’t arrive until after Christmas and they did not have time to complete their robot. However, in the competition, they were still able to score the majority of points when matched with other teams who had much more sophisticated robots.
The boys’ team, the Mechcanicons, took first place in teamwork, where team members worked together with other teams in an alliance, and won the excellence award, which was based on their driving skills, robot design, answers to questions they were asked and their engineer notebook. The Mechcanicons also won a second-place award for driving skills, missing the firstplace slot by only one point.
Seven members, representing both robotics teams, Gavin Puryear, Al Ruopp, Isaac Nichols, Jonah Shannon, Schuyler Lucht, Bobby Flippo and Ali Grotts, attended the February meeting of the Gravette school board. They displayed their robot, which they have named Bob, and the awards they won at the Harrison competition and told a little about what they do in their practice sessions and during competitions.
Since this was the first time for a robotics class at GUE, the students went to a competition in Fayetteville in November 2018, to see how the event was run. On Jan. 3, they visited Fulbright Junior High in Fayetteville where Danny Eddy, a Gravette High School graduate and fellow classmate of Mrs. Hadley’s, gave them some pointers and strategies to try.
The students constructed a model competition field in Mrs. Hadley’s room. They are proud of the field (they call it their “redneck field”), with barriers they have constructed from old science textbooks and Kleenex boxes, and showed it off in a recent practice session. The boys’ wins at Harrison qualify them for state competition at Arkansas Tech in Russellville on March 7. A couple of team members attended a coding session with Mr. Eddy and Jonathan, a student who has become a mentor to the
younger students, on Saturday, Feb. 23.
Competitions are sponsored by VEX Robotics, which makes the parts for the robots. The competition the Mechcanicons and Sensational Six entered at Harrison involved six trials with a total of 18 teams competing. Robots entered must pass inspection and be a certain size specified by VEX.
Students conduct practice sessions in their meetings before and after school, timing their sessions and recording the times in their engineer notebooks. They are excited about the upcoming trip to the state competition and feel they have a good chance to win some more awards there. Entries in their engineer notebooks also contain information about building their robots, problems they encountered and how they solved them, what worked and what didn’t.
The students have determined that Gavin Puryear is the best driver, so he has been chosen the lead driver and begins each competition, manipulating the robot to move, pick up and stack hubs. Bobby Flippo takes over from Gavin, and Jonah Shannon is also learning the ropes and improving his skills at driving. “It’s fun!” Jonah says. Schuyler Lucht has no interest in driving. He’s the team mechanic and works on repairing a robot when it’s damaged. “I like fixing stuff,” he says.
The first robotics kits were paid for with a grant from the Robot Education and Competition Foundation. The Gravette School District bought the second kit. Gavin’s family bought the hanging structure that the robot hangs on at the end of each session.
Mrs. Hadley and the students expressed their thanks to the school district and the Puryear family for their contributions. They say they also appreciate Mandy Barrett, Upper Elementary principal, who has been very supportive of their efforts, and the Upper Elementary PTO, which paid their entry fees for the Harrison competition. Mrs. Flippo, Bobby’s mother, has also taken care of them by providing snacks after school and helping Mrs. Hadley in numerous ways. The team T-shirts were provided by a generous donation from Benchmark Group Engineering in Rogers. The Mechcanicons hope to make all their supporters proud with their performance at state.