Observations all along the line - Kimball & the Southern Panhandle First
Observations all along the line - Kimball & the Southern Panhandle First
The Kimbots 4-H robotics team qualified for the Nebraska Lego League Championship that will be held Saturday at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Ashland. The seven-member team was one of the top two teams at a qualifying meet held in Sidney in order to qualify for state. Pictured, from left, are team members Timothy Mars, Todd Hunsaker, Stephen Bateman, Nate Mars, Ethan Bemis, Scott Hunsaker and Patrick Bruner. Not pictured: co-coaches Andrea Bemis and Wade Brashear.
The Kimbots are headed to state.
The Kimball Robotics Club, also known as the Kimbots, will compete in the First Lego League State Championships Saturday at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Ashland. They are one of 45 teams throughout the state to qualify, and did so at a meet earlier this year in Sidney.
In just the program's second year, the seven-member group scored enough points in four categories to beat 16 other teams and qualify for state. The top two teams in the 4-H sponsored meet at Sidney qualified for state.
Teams from around the state have roughly 10 weeks to prepare for qualifying the competition. This includes preparing a presentation, working on robots and more. The competition also has a different theme each year, and this year's theme is to rethink learning.
"It's more difficult than last year. Last year was nature's fury. This year is quite a bit more difficult," said team member Nate Mars.
The meets are broken into four categories - presentation, the robotics obstacle course, core values and robot design.
The presentation is given by all of the team members on the topic of innovative learning.
"We were sitting at Subway. We were talking about 3-D projections, and our co-coach (Wade Brasher), he said they actually have this technology out. It's called 3-D immersion," said team member Ethan Bemis.
The Kimbots' presentation is on giving students a 3-D way of learning about thunderstorms.
After coming up with the idea, the team then had to talk with industry professionals about how to use it. They talked with a program developer and a science teacher.
The program could be used by teachers to enter content into a platform, which then converts it into games.
The second portion of the competition is the actual robotics obstacle course. Members of the team put lego pieces together to make obstacles, and then program the robots to do certain things to the obstacles. Those things could be to move them to a certain location or do something else to them.
"Programming (the robots) is probably the most difficult part of this," Mars said.
Although there can be up to 10 people on each team, only three are allowed to touch the robots at a competition. The robots have two and a half minutes to move through the obstacle course, and each obstacle has a different point value. This is done three times, and the judges take the top score of the three tries.
Competing last year greatly helped the team this year.
"Last year was super duper easy and you could get a lot of points off of it, and we only got 133," Bemis said. "This year was way harder, and we beat that."
Kimball scored 140 points in the competition.
"The obstacle course this year is more tightly packed. Last year, they had two trucks and this fully open lane," Mars said.
"This one has tight turns and is much harder. Without having last year and all the little camps we had done, I don't think we could have ever made it to state," Bemis added.
The third part of the competition focuses on the core values of the Lego League, which are gracious professionalism and coopertition. This portion consists of a team building exercise which is unknown prior to the competition. The team building exercise at the qualifying meet in Sidney was making a square out of a rope - with a twist.
"We were blindfolded and we had to make a square out of a rope, without being able to see," Mars said. "It's supposed to show how you can work together to do this challenge. It was pretty difficult. We had one on each corner and then three on the sides. We had to touch each other's hands to figure out where we were. We had sort of a square. It was actually a roundish square."
The fourth portion of the competition is robot design. The team has to prepare an executive summary of the design and present it to the judges. The judges are then able to ask them any questions about the design. Examples of questions include how the team decided on the size of wheels on the robot, how they figured out the design process, their favorite programming part and more.
The qualifying meet is pressure-packed, since it is the only meet the team participates in and the only chance to make it to state.
As far as making state, Bemis summed it up in one word - "Awesome."
