They call themselves nerds and proudly wear the label geek.
And using donated and scrounged spare parts including wheels, gears and circuit boards, two dozen or so teenagers from Cobb County’s Walton High School cobbled together a robot that’s so good, they’re taking it to a world competition in St. Louis later this week.
“Nerds are cool and we’re going to rule the world,” said 15-year-old Madi Wewer, a sophomore on Walton’s robotics team.
Around sunup Wednesday, about a dozen of the 35 team members, along with their science teacher and a few chaperones, will climb aboard a bus and make the 10-hour drive to St. Louis.
Through Saturday, they’ll guide their 119-pound aluminum robot called Walta-Saurus-Rex through a series of competitions and obstacle courses, facing off against 300 or so other teams from across the U.S., as well as from Brazil, Canada and Israel. More than 2,000 other teams were eliminated in regional competitions.
Everyone asks the team if it’s like Battlebots, a cable TV show where remote controlled machines engage in combat, usually involving electric saw blades and robot destruction.
But it’s not, said Andrew Eikhoff, 18, a senior and one of the founding members of the team created three years ago.
“It’s like in Karate Kid, where you move forward or get eliminated based on challenges, but you don’t fight anyone,” he said. “You have to complete a series of tasks.”
The prize, along with trophies and bragging rights, is the knowledge and teamwork that the kids learned while building their machine and working together, said Brian Benton, their teacher and a former aerospace engineer for General Dynamics.
“It’s incredible to see these kids work and learn,” Benton said. “They’re taking material that normally they’d just learn in a textbook and applying it to real-life scenarios. They use principles of engineering and physics, computer programming, you name it.”
Team members also will be eligible to apply for college scholarships just for competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a New Hampshire-based nonprofit created in the late 1980s to help foster science education among teenagers.
Walton’s team was able to advance this far thanks to generous donations from corporate sponsors including General Electric, as well as workshop space provided in a vacant shopping mall by the Malone D. Mimms company. Just like a NASCAR racer, their T-shirts are embossed with sponsor logos.
Walta-Saurus-Rex cost about $5,000 to build. It looks like an electric, six-wheeled cart with a mini-crane in front and it’s the best that they’ve ever made, Andrew declared. It also has a “mini-bot” or small rover, about the size of a brick, that it will deploy to perform other tasks, such as magnetically climbing a 10-foot steel pole in less than two seconds.
“Our best practice time for mini-bot is 1.6 seconds, but that was just in practice,” said Gill Goldshlager, 15, a sophomore. “You never know what might happen in the real thing.”
Translation: Things can go wrong.
Paul Moskowitz, 17, a junior and the team’s chief computer programmer, admitted to accidentally making the robot go berserk one time.
“I thought I could make it go faster by changing a code value from negative 1 to positive 2,” Paul said. “It got pretty loud and was whipping cable around. There was a lot of smoke.”
Benton said that even the setbacks that the kids face teach them lessons they’ll never forget.
“It’s unbelievable how hard the kids work,” he said. “They must have put in 1,000 hours on this. Whether they win or not, they’re learning so much.”
And the team members have to maintain good grades to stay on the team.
“It helps us manage our time a lot more effectively,” said Gill. “Instead of watching a TV show or something, it’s like, I need to get my homework done right now so I can work on the robotics.”
If the teens stay with the club and complete a certain number of hours, they can earn a “letter” for letterman jackets, an honor typically reserved for a school’s elite athletes.
“It’s a sign of respect and it shows that science and math are just as important as football or other sports,” Madi said.
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