Home-schoolers construct farm robot for competition
RICHLAND TWP, Allegheny County — A group of 30 home-schooled students have been getting a crash course in mechanical engineering, wood shop, agriculture, science and marketing in the past weeks.
This year marks the sixth time the Family Instructors of the North Suburbs has entered a robotics team in the Wolverine BEST Robotics competition staged at Grove City College.
BEST, which stands for Boosting Engineering Science and Technology, is an annual competition in which students ages 11 to 17 have six weeks to design and build a robot that will be able to complete specific tasks on a timed course.
Because of the large commitment of time and resources, not all schools have teams that compete.
The FINS team has been spending about nine hours each week working on its robot, and team members will spend even more time as the Saturday competition draws closer, said Winkie Ilic of Seven Fields, one of the group's advisers.
The group has to work quickly and efficiently, and the competition also requires the team members to document and report how they arrived at each aspect of the design.
“To get 30 kids to invest and buy into an idea is no easy task,” Ilic said.
The students have been using a garage and workshop space provided by the Swanson family, which has two boys on the team, while some of the materials are paid for by local businesses.
Each year has a different theme and a different challenge, so it is impossible for the teams to get a head start before the competition officially starts.
This year's theme is farming, and the robots can earn points by harvesting fake ears of corn and collecting and planting golf balls, which symbolize seeds.
The robot is only one aspect of the course. The team also has a marketing team whose job is to do outreach, seek sponsors and create a presentation, which includes a four-walled booth with informational displays about the team and the year's topic, to bring to the competition.
One aim of the contest to get the students to learn about modern agriculture and how advances in technology have changed the way farmers plant fields and harvest crops.
Several of the students said one of the best aspects of the experience is working together with a group of their peers.
“It's really enjoyable to see so many people come together, and they have totally different ideas, and the ideas evolve and you can see things coming together,” said Mattie Kelly, an eighth-grader from Sarver who participates with her two brothers.To create the robot, the engineering group split into smaller teams. The duties of each team were included on a flow-chart, which is part of the report the team will submit.“We have a design process where we split into four teams. Each team has to come up with a design for how to best achieve their task,” said Mick Ilic, an eighth-grader from Seven Fields.For example, to harvest the corn, which are foam paint rollers placed at different heights, the home-schoolers designed a PVC-pipe claw that could open and close.Two years ago, the team took first place for its robot and second place overall, but last year it hit a snag when the robot's wheel had a hard time getting traction on a carpeted surface at the competition.This year, the home-schoolers are hoping they will avoid that problem, said Brandon Kelly, a 10th-grader from Sarver.“I think we're doing better than we were at this time last year. We know we're going to have better numbers,” he said.The group created a course in the garage that they believe is nearly identical to the one at the competition, to do test runs and troubleshoot.“We knew what the field would look like, so we were able to decide what we would need to build,” said ninth-grader Michael Gomez of Cranberry Township.Family Instructors of the North Suburbs is one of several informal homeschool networks through which parents share information and plan outings. The robotics team came together when several parents who had skills or knowledge organized to help guide the students, Winkie Ilic said.Though home-schooled children would have to join sports teams in the public school districts where they live, many of them band together for field trips and other extracurricular activities, she said.
