The Robotics 1 Class poses with TJ’s Mascot after the State Competition draws to a close. photo by Matt Santambrogio
Thomas Jefferson’s Robotics Team qualifies for Regionals after taking fourth place in the Rocky Mountain BEST, earning the coveted Game Award.
On October 26th, TJ’s Robotics Team placed fourth in the State and earned the Robotics Finalist Game Award from Rocky Mountain BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology), an organization who hosts annual competitions in order to involve kids with engineering, technology and science. The competition took place at the Metropolitan State University in Denver and featured an obstacle course designed to challenge 29 in-state teams’ robots. The event spanned from 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., with the actual competition beginning at 10:30. TJ, Skyline, Monarch and DSST Byers all qualified for Regionals and will be competing against 40 other schools from Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota in December. Regionals will occur on December 7th and 8th at the Crowne Plaza Denver Airport Convention Center.
Established in 2010, BEST is an all-volunteer, non profit organization which hosts annual, free-to-apply robotics competitions for middle and high school students. Since its establishment, BEST’s popularity has quadrupled, from hosting 130 students to 430 within a span of eight years. Teams had about six weeks to build their robot, and were required to master all parts of the course in order to make it to Regionals.
Matthew Santambrogio is the current CCT Robotics Teacher for Thomas Jefferson. As a prior English teacher, he jumped at the opportunity to teach Robotics after Matt Spampinato retired. Since beginning here eight years ago, he confessed, “It’s very challenging having a whole class work on one robot. The students that want to be involved get very heavily involved, then often times other students hide in the back.” However, the class can be beneficial for any student willing to participate. “It teaches them life skills. They’ve got very hard and fast deadlines they’re required to meet, and it puts them in areas where they have to think creatively,” he admitted. Santambrogio’s three levels of robotics classes are all currently participating in separate competitions, and, if his Robotics 1 sophomore class makes it to Nationals and wins, they will begin yet another contest and therefore start a new robot.
Phillip Nelson was one of five students who drove during the competition, with the other four consisting of Cooper White, Lilly Arbogast, Dylan Nelson, and Ethan Wheeler. In order to qualify to be a driver, students in the Robotics 1 class had to sign up and go in for practice. Nelson explained that one of the benefits of the class was having access to the classroom’s vast amount of equipment. The room sports a laser cutter, 3D printer, and a variety of power tools all available to the robotics students. Though there are plenty of cool gadgets, space would be nonexistent if all of the kids worked on the robot overall. Because the class is so large, students split into teams to work on separate parts. “I was supposed to be working on the conduit loader, but I switched teams to the wheel team, so we designed some really big wheels with treads to speed the robot up,” Nelson explained. The conduit loader is designed to lay pipes to help in the obstacle course. The entire robot is also remote controlled and completely coded by the students themselves.
There are many reasons to join Robotics, and, as Nelson puts it, “It’s great for learning a lot of the power tool skills you could use later in life, and how teams work.” TJ offers a Robotics 1, 2, and 3 class if anyone wishes to fully pursue robotics as much as possible during school.
If Sparta Robotica makes it to Nationals, they will have reached the end of the Rocky Mountain BEST. Even if the team does not make it, plenty of other competitions await their entry. Make sure to keep posted for any new announcements, and tune in to the internet on the 8th to find out the winners.
