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05/17/2016 01:30 PMWhile building a robot may seem like fun and games to some, to the Apple Pi Robotics team, it is a serious sport. After a successful season, the team recently made it to the World Championships in St. Louis where it advanced to the quarterfinals of the competition.
The Apple Pi robotics team, founded in 2006 by Al Bishop, is made up of approximately 50 high school students from Guilford and neighboring towns. The team, guided by professional mentors, works to build a robot in a tight, six-week period to compete in regional and national competitions.
This season the team competed in three District Competitions and the Regional Championship, from which they advanced to the World Championship. Overall, team members spent nearly 3,000 hours designing, building, and programing the robot for this year’s competitions.
James O’Connor, co-captain of the team and a junior at Daniel Hand High School (DHHS), said he has been pleased with the team’s success. He said they have been successful for a variety of reasons, including being an independent team.
“By not having it within a school system, we can run a more efficient team, but we can also be more inclusive,” he said. “We have over seven different high schools that are involved with the team.”
The team is open to students in grades 9 to 12 and no advanced knowledge of robotics is needed to join. To learn the skills needed to compete, the team members work along side a group of mentors who O’Connor said are critical to their success.
“The mentoring aspect is a pivotal part of this program,” he said. “This is the only major robotic program that is designed to have professional engineers working side by side with students. Other programs’ attitude will be more classroom style, where a mentor will teach and then just hand off, whereas our mentors work side by side with us. We will have students and mentors working on a robot at the same time.”
For the competition, rules of the game are announced in early January and teams are then given six weeks to design and build their robot, according to team member and DHHS freshman Kaitlyn Sandor.
“It all starts in the beginning of the season with training new members and getting the team ready through team building and learning different types of mechanics,” she said. “Then in the beginning of January, they tell you what the game is about and what the rules are and what your robot’s restrictions are, so then you have six very intense weeks to build your robot.”
This year the game took on a medieval theme with robots having to navigate a series of defenses before attempting to shoot a ball into a tower. O’Connor said the robot they designed for this game weighed nearly 140 pounds.
While the team members spoke highly of the competition, many mentioned how robotics has influenced other parts of their life as well, including Guilford High School (GHS) senior Mathew Moroso.
“I am graduating this year and I am planning to go into mechanical engineering and I realized that I want to do that because of robotics,” he said. “I am going to use what I learned here to go through mechanical engineering.”
Sandor said she, too, has taken a lot from this experience.
“It is such a tight time schedule that you really learn how to make the most of everything you do and through that, you learn how to be a leader,” she said.
To learn more about Apple Pi Robotics, visit www.applepirobotics.org.