Robotics teams to compete in championship-MSU state news

Hélène Dryden

Sophomore Renee Lynde chemical engineering and mechanical engineering freshman Cody work little on their robot Monday afternoon. The students are part of a team of Robotics is sponsored by the College of Engineering. The team will be competing in the VEX Robotics World Championship in April.

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The first MSU college robotics team is looking for her first trophy win while strengthening its relations with student teams who mentors on the 2011 VEX Robotics World Championship next month in Kissimmee, Florida

With a little more than a month to the championship tournament, the five MSU competing teams — composed of a college team, a high school and three high school teams — are excited to be building a team of two robots that must collect tubes and place them on entries through an obstacle course.

The members of the college team meet Monday through Thursday, working six to eight hours per week on their robots and sometimes more like a deadline approaches or technical problems occurs, said Cody bit, mechanical engineering freshmen and a member of the team.

Although time consuming and annoying, is that form part of the Robotics program and cooperation between the teams worth it, he said.

"If we are going to work with (high school and high school teams), they show us new and innovative ideas of things that we hadn't thought yet," little spoken. "There is kind of this back and forth connection of technology really between the University and high school — (a) flow of ideas."

The teams will a scrimmage 6-8 hours Friday in room 2400 in the building Engineering to prepare the tournament next month.

Beginning as a way for students to get a closer connection to the high school and high school robotics teams that they mentor through the programme VEX Robotics, the MSU Spartan college team been able to learn a lot in turnWhitman, J.T., a mechanical engineering senior and head coach of the team said.

The teams go by the program with an emphasis on stem learning — of science, technology, engineering and math fields.

"We are all learning all the things that could go wrong, all the problems," he said. "We can better understand the problems that (the high school and middle school teams) are going through. We have a look at what good designs for work (and not). "

The interactions between the teams might be the secret weapon leads them to victory in the Championship, said Whitman.

"There are not as many college teams than there are high school teams are," he said. "Our advantage is that we've been to numerous games already. each year there is a specialization that works best and (it is approximately) which team perfects it."

Fun is a bonus to the mentoring program with the main goal is increased involvement of students in STEM fields, said Drew Kim, Assistant to the Dean for recruitment and K-12 outreach in MSU's College of Engineering.

"Usually what happens is that students who are involved in this robotics are more likely to enter in engineering fields," he said. "(College Students) more information about programming and building, and the circuit — they initially, leadership, teamwork and mentoring (via this program) will understand."

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