Annie Camp Junior High School students won the second annual Red Wolf Robotics Competition hosted by Arkansas State University mechanical engineering students. 

The winning team consisted of seventh grader Cooper Hunt and eighth graders Caleb Hirsch, 

Victoria Flores and Keagan Hicks. They said winning was an accomplishment. Annie Camp won for the second year in a row with 62 points. 

The competition aimed to introduce fifth through eighth graders to engineering and robotics. 

“There are so many kids who are interested in engineering, but don’t know where to start. This is a damn good starting point for them,” said Shivan Haran, director of mechanical engineering, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering. “We find that several of the younger kids keep coming back.”

Participants controlled their robots through an obstacle course. Scattered across the course were green blocks, which the robots grabbed and then placed into two baskets in the course. Each team member had to deliver at least one block to a basket. 

Any damage to the arena or knocking over Pokémon statues littered throughout the course resulted in penalties. Each team got one round in the arena, with the round lasting 12 minutes.

The team’s winning robot, named Meko after the “Transformers” character of the same name, used a clutch design. The design used a claw to grab blocks, but the claw was mounted vertically using a crane-like design instead of horizontally. 

While some team members will age out of the competition next year, they are still working on improving their robot design. They said they are taking inspiration from the final robot to compete. 

“They had a spinning mechanism that could intake (blocks) really fast and maybe we could add a smaller version of that,” Hunt said. 

The mechanical engineering students sent VEX Robotics kits to participating schools before the contest. Students could use pre-made designs included in the kit instructions or create their own designs. 

The kits require no programming knowledge and use plastic pins and other components to fit together easily.

The schools invited to compete comprised of Annie Camp Junior High School, Buffalo Island Central Junior High, Highland Middle School, Marked Tree Elementary, East Poinsett County High School, and Jonesboro Visual and Performing Arts School. Annie Camp and Marked Tree sent two teams and Visual and Performing Arts could not attend due to travel issues.

Highland scored 49 points, East Poinsett County scored 39, Buffalo Island Central scored 38, Group Two from Marked Tree scored 28 and Group One 25, and Group One from Annie Camp scored 19. 

Morgan Diamond, a senior mechanical engineering major from Jonesboro and president of the A-State chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME, said they geared the contest toward fifth through eighth graders because it is an easy time to get them interested in robotics and engineering.

 “They can get started working on engineering now and then they’ll get to high school, take some shop classes, or maybe do some more higher-level robotics stuff,” Diamond said. “After that, they come to college and they already have a background in robotics and they have an interest in engineering. They’ve already been practicing.”

The obstacle course was completely redesigned from last year. Instead of using textbooks and red Solo cups as obstacles, official VEX arena pieces served as barriers, towers and more.

In addition, trophies were given out to all teams who came in first, second and third place. Last year, only the team who came in first place got trophies. Funding for the event came from the Student Government Association’s Action Fund Commission and the Kays Foundation.

In addition to exposing young kids to engineering, Haran said the contest helped the college kids running the event.

“This kind of works into the leadership role. They essentially know how to run such events. They get to learn how to address a crowd, they learn how to teach some of these kids how to do some of those little engineering projects and so on,” Haran said. “Overall, it gives them the exposure of being out there as leaders in engineering.”

Categories: News