Seven teams of local middle schoolers competed in the Red Wolf Robotics Competition held on Saturday. The event, hosted by the Arkansas State University branch of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), sought to inspire local students about both engineering and robotics. 

“These groups come in and we want local schools to participate and hopefully it’ll grow,” said Dr. Shivan Haran, director of mechanical engineering. “It’ll also give the students some hands-on experience but also have some fun.”

Two weeks before the event began, the mechanical engineering department loaned out Vex robotics kits to the schools.

“They snap together like Legos and it’s really user friendly. So it’s good for introducing young people into robotics because you don’t have to get on a computer and physically program anything,” said William Rigsby, a senior mechanical engineering major from Hot Springs and the president of ASME. “You can just plug a controller into it and build a robot. It’s really easy for kids to understand and it gives them an introduction into how control systems work.”

The competition, hosted in Centennial Hall, had a small obstacle course in the center of the room. Scattered across the course were plastic cups and various engineering textbooks, which the student’s robots had to avoid as they grabbed blocks and tossed them into a bin. 

Each team was given 15 minutes to traverse the course and bring back blocks as they went. The winning team would be whoever brought back the most blocks the quickest while avoiding touching as many obstacles as possible.

The schools present at the competition were Annie Camp Junior High School, Westside Middle School, Buffalo Island Central Junior High School, Oak Grove Middle School and Highland Middle School. Teams were composed of two to four members. Due to the larger number of students they brought, Annie Camp and Highland brought two teams.

Engineering students who volunteered at the event said they hoped the event would give the middle schoolers opportunities they themselves might not have had in middle school.

“Doing this inspires the next generation to join engineering and to be introduced to STEM,” said Jenny Strano, a junior mechanical engineering major from Cherokee Village and president of the Robotics Club.

“If I would have done something like this, I would have been able to realize, ‘Oh, like this is what engineering is.’ It’s good that kids actually know what engineers kind of do,” said Kailey Rodriguez, a junior mechanical engineering major from Drasco.

Rangsiya Faihen, a junior mechanical engineering major from Thailand, said the engineering department is planning on hosting the competition again in the future.

“It’s been successful so far. We would like to do this every year. We would like to host more schools in the future,” Faihen said.

The middle school students said this event piqued their interest in both A-State and its engineering program.

“They’ve been watching the videos about the stuff in the engineering department,” said Matthew Sills, an Environmental and Spatial Technologies (EAST) facilitator at Buffalo Island Central Junior High School. “They’ve already been asking me ‘what is this engineering’, ‘what’s the difference between mechanical and civil.’ It’s definitely opened some doors.”

Zenia Chaires, a seventh grader at Buffalo Island Junior High School, said her team is already planning their robot for next year.

“We’re all going to get in EAST and we’re going to start working on our robot because we all like each other, we’re all friends,” Chaires said. “We’ve all seen what we did this year and we can compare it to next year. We can use what we were good at.”

At the end of the competition, all students present were given a certificate. Annie Camp Junior High School won both second and first place.

Fatma Abdelnaby, Evie Mixon and Celeste Barrett, all eighth graders, came in second place.

“I feel like my team works really well together, so we all put in an equal amount of effort and this is what came out,” Mixon said.

Elijah Burrell, an eighth grader and Keagan Hicks, a seventh grader, were the winners. Both teams used the same robot design, a Clutch design with extra wheels underneath to act as a counterweight.

“I did not think we were going to win, I had zero confidence,” Burrell said. “I’m still shocked. It feels good.”

Shaun Hicks, an engineering and robotics teacher at Annie Camp Junior High School, said his students had experience competing in robotics competitions. 

“I thought that they did really well in a two week time frame of learning how to drive these robots. It was good to see them perform well and learn a lot today,” Hicks said. 

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