Students throughout Northwest Indiana spent the day working together with other schools for the annual robotics tournament on Saturday, January 6.
Rachel Walker, the seventh-grade science teacher at Taft Middle School, also serves as their robotics coach. She describes the different tasks that each team is aiming to accomplish.
“We have 40 teams from local schools competing this year,” Walker said. “There are two teams that work as an alliance when they’re on the field at the same time to move blocks into the scoring zones before time runs out.”
Most teams are split into multiple teams. The students spent months determining which job they would be best suited to in the competition.
“At our school, we’re broken up into six teams,” Walker said. “The game changes every year and it’s announced at the end of May. We started brainstorming in September and figuring out what tasks each student wanted to accomplish. The students built their robots, worked on programming, and continuously practiced to learn how to make the necessary modifications.”
Walker has been coaching in the robotics program since arriving at Crown Point. She’s a firm believer that this experience provides students with strong skills in the big picture.
“The great thing about this program is that it helps build problem-solving skills for kids," Walker said. “It allows them to learn about building, coding, and the engineering process in general. It helps people realize how to persevere and work really hard to overcome obstacles together.”
Walker’s son, Benjamin Baker, is actually the reason she got roped into robotics originally.
Baker is an IT worker for Crown Point schools. He served as tournament manager for this event and was impressed with how the robotics community has continued to evolve in the Region since the years that he went to Taft Middle School.
“The amount of people doing this has increased tremendously over the years,” Baker said. “When I was doing it, there were about 30 people on our team at Crown Point. Now there are more than 50 and we’re starting to see that growth throughout the entire country. We’ve had teams go to state in Indianapolis and the world competition in Dallas. It grows bigger every year. There are so many people to meet and it’s just an awesome experience.”
Jacob Vlachos and Henry Jones, two students at Taft Middle School, were working together on the field for the tournament. Vlachos first became interested in robotics when he was in third grade.
“I was always a big fan of Lego growing up,” Vlachos said. “It’s really cool to see what ideas other people come up with. We all have a similar interest and the wavelength that you get from sharing something in common with people is beautiful.”
The love for Lego was one of the biggest reasons that drew Jones to the program as well.
“Once I figured out there was a place for a lot of people that also enjoy doing this, I decided to jump into it,” Jones said. “The biggest thing for me is learning about our robots and seeing how much we can push our limits of what we can do.”
The Indiana Robotics State Championship will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday, March 23.
For more information on Taft Middle School, you can visit their website.