Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Robotics team competes in First Championship
SILOAM SPRINGS — Happy Accidents, one of Siloam Springs’ LEGO Robotics team, competed in the First Championship in Houston last month.
Happy Accidents is a community-organized middle school robotics and innovation team, Jeremy Weathers, one of the coaches for Happy Accidents, said in an email.
The team qualified for the April 17-20 First Championship after winning the Arkansas Championship Tournament at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville’s student union Jan. 20, Weathers said.
Siloam Springs has two other LEGO Robotics teams — the Shadowbots and Bricks-n-Motion, Weathers said.
Happy Accidents met for a practice meeting at the Balzer Technology Center on May 2 where team members discussed their experiences in Houston.
John Brown University provided Happy Accidents with a meeting space and parts for its robots. The Siloam Springs Chamber of Commerce provided funding and access to the downtown maker space, Weathers said.
Happy Accidents team members competed in four main areas during the First LEGO League competitions, Weathers said. The league is national with regional units.
The four areas were a 2.5-minute autonomous robot game, Weathers said. The first involved describing the innovative aspects of the physical and software robot design, Weathers said.
The second area was presenting a solution to a real-world problem the team identified and researched, and to show how they’ve exhibited the FIRST core values of respectfully working together as a team to discover new skills and ideas,
The third area focused on using creativity and persistence to solve problems. The last area was how to have have a positive impact on the world, Weathers said.
For the innovation project, Happy Accidents presented a board game called Staff Masters that was designed to help people learn how to read music, Weathers said.
The team plans to publish the game, said Paxton Weathers, the code writer, project manager for the robot and unofficial group spokesperson.
Staff Masters has been play-tested by game players and musicians, Paxton Weathers said.
Happy Accidents’ robot used modular, drop-on attachments designed to solve multiple challenges in the robot game and was programmed with object-oriented, multi-threaded Python code, Weathers said.
The team experienced different highlights in Houston. For William Elkey, the lead prototyper and head researcher, the chance to meet Mark Rober, a YouTuber and engineer, stood out, he said.
Beatrice Posey, team project manager and historian, enjoyed meeting different people, she said.
Joshua Weathers, chief mechanic, said his favorite part was clips. Clips is where team members bring clothespins and clip them to other peoples’ clothes, backpacks, etc., said Jeremy Weathers in a follow-up text.
“The goal was to see how many times you could get clothespins on other people without them noticing,” Jeremy Weathers said.
Happy Accidents brought a few hundred clothespins with the team name laser burned on them to the Arkansas State Championships and the First Championship in Houston, Weathers said.
Zane Ellingson, publishing editor, said he enjoyed watching people being pushed into the pool at their Airbnb. Ellingson broke his leg before the trip, so he could not participate, he said.
Paxton Weathers said he enjoyed visiting Space Center Houston and the alliance match where Happy Accidents worked with other robotics teams in different robotics matches.
“That was probably my favorite part,” Paxton Weathers said. “I got to see really how far we had all come in that certain aspect of it.”
This will be Paxton Weathers’ and Elkey’s last year with Happy Accidents because they are aging out and will be in high school next year, they said.
Paxton Weathers said he will return to mentor the team. Elkey said he was not sure what he would do.
Paxton’s brother Joshua Weathers, Ellingson, Posey and Corwin Dennis, who was not present at the team meeting, will be a part of Happy Accidents next year, Paxton said. Posey, the only female member of the team, hopes more girls will be interested in joining Happy Accidents, she said. Paxton Weathers said they are trying to recruit more females.