Shawn Whyte is now in his second year of leading the Unity Composite High School robotics team.
The robotics program creates an optionfor students who want to participate in a team, but aren’t interested in sports, drama, or other clubs the school has to offer. UCHS’s goal for robotics is to engage students who have an interest in technology and engineering and love to be challenged using their skills.
In addition to the competitive robotics team, UCHS offers other robot kits that many students use over lunch periods and after school to start to create that spark of curiosity in this type of technology and possibly, when they get older, they will be ready to enter competitions.
“I have always been interested in technology and computers,” Whyte says.
“I have working with programming and electronics, and I see the benefit it can have for students. Robotics blends engineering, programming and problem solving into a great outlet for these students.”
Whyte says last year was the inaugural year in offering UCHS Robotics to students and the team competed in Sask. Polytechnic’s My Robot Rumble at the end of March 2016 and the UCHS program grew from there.
This year’s Vex robot, named Paul, competed in the Starstruck challenge. This challenge is played on a 12-foot square playing area that is cut in half by a wall. The objective was to work with one other team to throw big foam stars and 18-inch cube beanbags over the wall onto the other side.
Points are awarded for how far the objects are thrown away from the wall. On the other half of the playing area is another alliance of two teams trying to throw objects as well, returning objects thrown and trying to score their own points. The match is broken into two sections, 15 seconds of autonomous play, where the robot relies solely on programming with no driver, and a 90-second driver phase.
The UCHS robotics team this year includes Salvador Lucenio, Dawson Jensen, Dallas Spendelow and Marco Sin. Salvador and Dawson contributed heavily to the design and the building of the robot. Marco and Dallas worked on the programming for both the autonomous phase and configuring the motors and sensors to work with the driver control.
A week before the Jan. 20 competition, the team completely rebuilt the robot and its programming making for a tense week. Following that, the team had just over a month to make some design changes to improve efficiency and effectiveness for the final competition.
“At competitions, the team is required to reprogram the robot to make it work better for autonomous and driver control between matches,” Whyte says.
“They had to do some design changes as well in between the matches to add and remove functionality to better accomplish the goal.
“While other robots were competing, the team watched to analyze possible strengths and weaknesses of each robot to create a strategy for the match when each robot is part of our alliance, so we can work to each others’ strengths and fill in gaps.”
Whyte says problem solving is a key skill in robotics.
“Nothing ever goes as planned, and the students need to think on the fly to solve problems.”
Communication is another major need for the team, he says.
“They need to communicate issues, give and share ideas, create strategies, and solve all problems together.”
At the Jan. 20 competition, the team came in second in driver skills. March 4, at the Vex Border Battle the team came in third after round robin and were eliminated from the semifinals. However, the UCHS team was awarded the sportsmanship award for that competition.
“For being our first crack at this competition, the team was ecstatic and enjoyed an overall great experience,” Whyte says.
March 24 the team travelled to Saskatoon for the Sask. Polytechnic My Robot Rumble where they worked with Sumobots. These small robots are completely autonomous, searching for the competitor’s robot and pushing it out of the sumo ring on its own.
This was a provincial competition that has more than 100 schools and around 200 teams competing for top prizes.
