Knights: The Knights robotics team is going to state for the first time in 18 years
The Knights robotics team stood in the arena of their final match at the FIRST Tech Challenge qualifiers on Jan. 17 after ten weeks of 2-hour-long practices three days a week.
Partnered with an Olathe Northwest team, their goal was to use their robot to launch colored balls into a goal and score the most amount of points in a given time frame. The rest of their team, including main builder and senior Lex Kangethe cheered from the stands.
Senior Jake Winfield maneuvered his controller and the robot launched the last ball in the goal. The Knights won against their opponents with a score of 181-160.
“I was screaming like hell,” Kangethe said. “I was jumping for joy. I mean, my voice was so tired by the end of it.”
That was it. The Knights team, considered the “A” team, did something no robotics team at SM East had done in the last 18 years. They qualified to state.
But even then their robot needed improvements — their scoring accuracy was around 50%, according to robot designer senior Teddy Morgan, because they didn’t have time to fix the ramp, which launched the balls.
So the team went back to the whiteboard and came up with solutions.
“I let them do their own research and produce their own robots,” robotics teacher Vincent Miller said. “And that's why each team has quite unique robots between them, because each of them has their own idea, and then they follow through and try to make a robot that works really well.”
Now, the Knights are buying a better camera for the robot, building a lifting mechanism to earn more points and using a new motor to shoot balls into the goal faster.
“I would say [going to state makes me feel] triumphant,” Niang-Trost said. “Like [knowing] that all of the work we put in this year has matched to something we're able to show our robot off to an area that's larger than our community and our region and take it all the way to a place that a lot of us haven't been before.”
Find the Knights team members' names in the word search below.
Calvary: The Calvary robotics team is competing for state qualification on Feb. 21
Puzzle-piece foam yoga mats on junior Leo Vicuña’s basement floor. A tangle of electrical cords. A hot glue gun, pair of pliers, two Celsius drinks, thirty wiffle balls. And most importantly, the robot, Tesseract, that the Calvary team’s making adjustments to the night before a competition — with the occasional 20-minute video game break.
A typical competition morning went as late as 4 a.m.. Sophomore Yabo Wang was surviving on a nap and a Chat GPT-optimized caffeine-intake routine. Vicuña had his oat milk hazelnut latte. And sophomore Arri Janzen was sleeping at home to save his energy for driving the robot the next morning.
The Calvary robotics team placed third at the state qualifiers competition on Jan. 17, but that didn’t secure them a place in the state competition. But because the team was in the top six — last year they placed 22nd out of 33 — they have another chance of qualifying for state by competing in the super qualifiers on Feb. 21.
Since the competition is based on how many points the robot can score, the team is working on replacing the wheels with firmer, rubber ones to make their robot go faster by at least 80%, according to Janzen. They’re also adjusting their robot to fire balls more accurately.
“But [the adjustments] doesn't mean anything if your driver can't use them properly,,” Wang said. “Which means that [success relies on] if you can analyze the other opponent and have a basic strategy and have a really, really confident driver who can adapt to whatever situation.”
So leading up to the super qualifiers, the team meets almost every day where one of Janzen’s tasks is practicing their change from robot-centric to field-centric control, making it more intuitive and easier for him to control.
“I'm 100% confident we're making it [to state], because we're making [the robot] way faster,” Janzen said. “And like, I'm the driver, so we’re basically gonna make it already.”
Find the Calvary team members' names in the word search below.
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