The Wheeling Park High School’s Robotics team hosted in The Gateway to the West Robotic Competition at the end of January at the Highland Sports Complex.
Dr. Luke Shephard, Wheeling Park High School’s Robotics team coach, prepared this event which hosted teams from all over the world right here in Wheeling, WV.
This year’s challenge was called High Stakes, and revolves around placing and picking up rings onto stakes. There are four stakes attached to the walls of the arena, alternating heights. In the center of the field, there is a ladder where the robots can climb, and for each rung of the ladder that you clear you can earn points.
The Iron Patriots, worked so hard to prepare for this momentous event and every member of the team helps in the process.
“Each team prepares and creates an engineering notebook,” said Shephard. “This notebook documents a team’s engineering design process, game strategy development, and code creation.”
This engineering notebook may seem simple to someone who does not participate in robotics, but it in fact, is one of the most important parts of the competition.
“The notebook is then evaluated by a team of judges and scored on a rubric,” said Shephard.
Those on the robotics team are interviewed in person by the same judges who evaluate the team’s engineering notebook.The majority of awards handed at the competition are judged awards, which makes this a crucial part of the competition and really influences what awards are given to our team, and how our team is judged.
The Iron Patriots consist of six teams, all of which have names that correspond to their team number.
“Across these six teams, there are 30 students who have various roles on the team such as driver, coder, builder, notebooker, and scout,” said Shephard.
The team names are K-otic, Platypus, Wagyu, X-Ray, Yikes, and Zenith.
“Generally, we practice five days a week when we are in the middle of competition season, but we begin practicing in June and begin competing in October,” said Shephard. “ If everything works out, we usually finish up our season in late April at the World championship located at Dallas, TX.”
These practices consist of the team building, coding, and creating engineering notebooks. It’s truly overlooked how much brain power it takes to be in robotics, and prepare for competitions.
Unfortunately, none of our teams won the Gateway to the West competition this year. Though two of our teams, team X-Ray and team team Yikes, did make it to the elimination bracket. Outside of this competition, team X-Ray has won four tournaments this year, three of which had team Yikes as their alliance partner.
Just because there wasn’t a win at the Gateway to the West competition this year, doesn’t mean there won’t be next. Wheeling Park High School’s Robotics Team has shown dedication, strength, perseverance, and incredible teamwork. For that in itself, they are so seen, and so admired for all of the hard work they put into what they do.
