Robots vs. Robots
LOREN BENOIT/Press Canfield Middle School students, from left, Sullivan Gilbert, Justice Juliano, Emma Hazel, Hayden Levy, Brooke Strong and Amber Nelson, react as their robots battle Tuesday afternoon at Robotics Club.
LOREN BENOIT/PressBrighton Spencer closely watches his robot battle another at Robotics Club Tuesday afternoon at Canfield Middle School.
LOREN BENOIT/PressAmber Nelson starts her robot for a dual at Robotics Club after school on Tuesday at Canfield Middle School.
LOREN BENOIT/PressHarry Tomasi grabs a peg used for defense for his robot, Senta, at Robotics Club Tuesday afternoon at Canfield Middle School.
LOREN BENOIT/PressBrighton Spencer adds a wire to connect to the port of his robot during Robotics Club Tuesday afternoon at Canfield Middle School.
By BETHANY BLITZ
Staff Writer
“Three — Two — One — Sumo!” cried Chris Regan, a math teacher at Canfield Middle School, as two robots charged each other in the middle of a ring.
The robots’ programmers, a bunch of students ranging from sixth grade through eighth grade, cheered their creations from the side.
Finally, one robot overpowered the other and won the match.
“Oh my god, we won!” yelled one student. “How did we do that?”
The Robotics Club at Canfield Middle School is in the middle of its in-house tournament, where robots try to push each other out of a fighting ring, similar to sumo-wrestling.
Teams of students programed their robots to turn around when they detect the black ring so they don’t go out of bounds and to charge when they detect another robot.
Some robots were programmed to spin around — hopefully deflecting their opponent’s attacks and pushing them from the ring.
The robots that won two of three matches won the round.
After a robot lost, students would take them back, tinker with them and figure out what went wrong.
Hayden Levy, an eighth-grader, has been in the Robotics Club since it started three years ago.
“I like the teamwork and the problem solving,” she said. “There’s a few eighth-graders here that have been doing it all three years and we’re a pretty closely knit group.”
The club’s tournament will be played out at the club’s next few meetings and is expected to finish sometime next week.
The club has about 25 students that meet three times a week to learn about coding and building robots.
Regan, the teacher who mentors the club, said about a third of the students in the club are active, computer programmers on their own time, building websites and creating video games, but there are a lot of beginning coders in the group, too.
The club uses visual coding, where students can look at the different components or actions of their robot’s program and can drag and drop blocks into different places within the code.
“Anyone can start it, but it goes up to very high-end coding that gets very scientific,” Regan said. “These kids are stoked for their robots; it’s a way of supporting each other. We compete, but we cooperate when we do.”
Brighton Spencer, a seventh-grader, joined the club this year but has previously taught himself how to design websites.
“I’ve always been fascinated by creating things instead of just playing with them,” he said. “I thought robotics would be a cool way to create something and play with it and learn things about it.”
Brighton’s robot, Shark Bait, didn’t win its first round of battles, so he tried to fix the sensors on it.
“We designed it to charge other robots,” he said. “We were going for a claw mechanism, too, but it didn’t work out.”
Canfield’s Robotics Club competes in the FIRST LEGO League, where teams research a real-world problem and develop a solution. Students then design, build and program a robot to compete against other teams. The competition is usually themed to the world problem.
“It lets them figure out why we do things, how we should go about them and in what order,” Regan said. “I just want them to have experience with problem solving.”