High school students compete in robotics events.
Team Clutch 5429 of Saint Gertrude High School.
Photo courtesy of FIRST Chesapeake
The robots are here, and Virginia high school students are designing them.
Team Clutch 5429 of Saint Gertrude High School in Richmond was part of the finalist alliance in the last round of competition at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Richmond Tech Challenge this past school year. FIRST hosts a number of robotics tournaments in which students from around 30 middle and high schools design, build, and program robots. They then compete against other schools’ robots in a high-tech sporting event. Chad Suhr, robotics coach and physics and computer science teacher for Saint Gertrude, says that being on the robotics team is a great experience for his students, as are the values FIRST promotes through its tournaments. “One of its key values is gracious professionalism,” he says, adding that promoting this value encourages students to help one another, making the competition healthy and fun for students at a variety of levels.
The robotics team at Osbourn High School in Manassas won the Autonomous Award for their self-directed robot at the FIRST Chesapeake District competition sponsored by Ford Motor Company. This award recognized the team’s ability to build a robot that could sense its surroundings and execute tasks without being handled manually.
If all this talk of robots makes you a little nervous that they might take over, you’ll be relieved to know that students at Catholic High School in Virginia Beach can take a Cyber Literacy and Robotics course. The first semester focuses on the responsibilities, threats, and legal constraints that come with operating in cyberspace and also teaches students the fundamentals of electricity. Then, in the second semester, students will use a Parallax Boe-Bot microcontroller to learn robotics fundamentals.
For more about Saint Gertrude High School, Osbourn High School, or Catholic High School, check out Top High Schools and Colleges 2019. This article originally appeared in our October 2019 issue.
