By Tribune photo by Carol Bronson
Robotics team leader Matt Hart watches as sister Katie closes the nose of a model airplane. A team of Pratt High School students is building a robot that will assemble and display the airplane at a contest later this month.Students learn marketable skills building a mobile robot
By Carol Bronson
October 07, 2008
The task is to assemble a model airplane and move it to a display area four feet above the table. It’s not a hard job for high school students — except that they first have to build a robot to build the airplane. Human hands can’t touch anything but the control mechanism for the robot.
Matt Hart is the senior leader — “he’s got the big picture,” said Heath Sharp, Pratt High School science teacher, who is overseeing the project that the students will enter at the Heartland BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) competition later this month at Northwest Oklahoma State University in Alva. Hart has three deputies. Logan Barker is in charge of creating and making the design. Greg Jones keeps everyone on task and Elisabeth Short provides the documentation.
At a kick-off event Sept. 13, the students received a free package of materials, electronics and game rules. By last week they had assembled a test board to make sure everything does what it’s supposed to do. On Saturday they have to submit their documentation at a Mall Day in Enid.
“It’s like were trying to sell it to a group of judges,” Hart explained. The team had hoped to have the robot built by then, but have revised their goal to “half a robot” that they can drive around but it won’t be able to lift things. The robot must be ready to do its jobs on Oct. 25.
Three types of operations involved. The students have to decide how the robot will move, how it will lift its arm and how it will grab parts.
“We usually get two out of three,” Barker said.
Through observation, trial and error, past projects of their own and other students and experiencing “quite a few ways not to do it,” the students decide “how we can make it out of the junk they give us.”
They work in Sharp’s classroom during a 40-minute seminar period each day — unless they have other class work they need to catch up — in a science projects class, and after school on Mondays.
“It’s a great experience for working on a team,” Hart said. “A lot of people do this for a job.”
“These are skills that are marketable — figuring out a machine to do what a company needs it to do and make a profit,” Sharp acknowledged.
He is a proponent of contests for students who like science and want more than they get in the classroom.
“It gives them something to rally around, a showcase to show what they can do,” Sharp said. “In a perfect world there would be 100 percent participation in something for everybody. This fills an important niche.”
Elena Botello and Amanda Schmidt participated at an Eco-Meet at the Dillon Nature Center in Hutchinson last week. Students were tested on their knowledge of tallgrass prairie and invertebrate animals in Kansas. They scoured the grounds of the Nature Center to fill a scavenger hunt list and communicated their ideas in what is described as “more than a skit and less than a speech.” Areas for study change each year.
Small college scholarships are awarded to the winners. Botello hasn’t won in two years of participation, but that’s definitely a goal for her final year of high school next year.
She and her teammate studied for about two months to get ready for the competition.
“I like studying for it,” Botello said. “I always learn something new. It’s fun.”
Pratt High graduated a strong Eco-Meet team last year and had only two participants this year, Sharp said.
On Aug. 27 the Pratt High science projects class won a cardboard boat race sponsored by Macksville High School. The assignment was to design and build a boat of cardboard and tape that was capable of holding one person and could be launched and paddled across a swimming pool. A second PHS boat capsized in the last heat of the qualifying rounds.
A number of students will be involved in Science Olympiads during the spring semester.
