Students at Lima South Middle School are gearing up for this week's National Robotics Competition. Sixth, seventh, and eighth graders have spent all year building and programming robots for the competition.
The groups will compete in a robot maze, sumo wrestle robot contest, and a robot hockey game. They built the bots out of Legos and programmed their movements on computers, using cell phone apps to control them.
Their teacher says she helped guide them, but the trial and error was all up to the students. "I do not build their programs for them, I do not build their robots, I watch and I give them suggestions about what maybe they could look at changing, and if something goes wrong then I help them fix that, but they do everything on their own," said Science and Robotics Teacher, Jessica Spencer, "So that's one of the reasons I'm really proud of our kids is because they don't, it's not me telling them how to do it and what to do, they figure it out."
Last year the students never got a robot through the entire maze, but they say this time they've worked through the difficulties of programming. "Getting it to turn, turns are the hardest part, because you don't want it to turn too much, because then it might mess up the rest of the maze," said seventh grader, Michael Bishop, "And you don't want it to not turn enough because it might do the same thing."
The competition is this Thursday and Friday April 7th and 8th.
