June 8, 2022
Humble ISD middle school students have the opportunity to develop engineering skills and prepare for future careers by competing in a robotics competition that the district offers.
Competitors build their own robots to participate in a challenge called ‘fire fiasco,’ which simulates the use of robots to save people from a burning building. In the challenge, humans are represented as green foam balls surrounded by orange foam balls, which represent fire. To win, the students use their robots to remove as many green foam balls from the area without touching the orange balls in a set amount of time.
Students from Humble ISD middle schools competed in a robotics tournament at Westlake Middle School on May 21st. Competitors use robots they built to retrieve green foam balls from the structure without touching the orange foam balls.
Joe Paneitz, the tournament director and robotics teacher at Atascocita High School, said the challenge helps students build skills necessary for modern-age careers.
“It helps them improve their problem solving, teamwork, programming and engineering,” Mr. Paneitz said. “All these are necessary skills.”
Creekwood Middle School students Lucanne Robbins, Katie Tims, Nathaly Salas, Elissa Alpha, and Mailey Nevitt won first place, West Lake Middle School student Tanner Western placed second, and Creekwood students Daniel Rocha, John Howk, Isaac Mahmood, Christian Cerda, and Drake Buchan won third place. The competition was held at Westlake Middle School on May 21st. This is the first year the competition has been held since May of 2019.
Randall Wilson, the robotics coach at Creekwood Middle School, said his students did most of the engineering and building themselves, while he assisted when they got stuck. The winning team came up with a design that no other team at the competition did, Wilson said. Instead of using a design with the claw arm raised above the motor, the students reattached it to make it lower to the ground, allowing them to earn bonus points.
“We took the stand off so that it would be flat, so we could get underneath all of our obstacles and get the extra points,” Lucanne Robbins, an eighth grader at Creekwood and member of the winning team said. “Two days before the competition, we took the arm off and rebuilt the thing.”
The students also received extra points for creating pieces for their robot with a 3D printer and a laser cutter. Mailey Nevitt, a Creekwood student on the winning team, said Coach Wilson taught them how to use 3D printers in their engineering class.
Nevitt said they spent a lot of time in and out of class building their robot, sometimes staying two hours after school working on it. The winners said they feel more prepared to go into their high school engineering and automotive classes after learning how to construct a robot.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” Robbins said. “You learn from mistakes, but now I feel like I don’t need to make those mistakes again.”