Robotics team competes in Missoula

ST. REGIS – St. Regis High School student Steven Lowry and the rest of his design team spent last Thursday carefully packing away a contraption that they hoped would complete a complex task at a competition in Missoula all by remote.

The reason the team’s creation has to perform the task by remote is because it’s a robot they built from scratch using the skills they learned in the robotics class at the St. Regis High School.

In Christine West’s class, students utilize skills learned under the STEM curriculum. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics and is a widely used discipline used to teach the concepts to students.

West said the students who take her robotics class learn a wide array of skills and have to use them in order to build a robot that can accomplish a new task every year.

This year, West said the robots have to pick up objects and move them in a controlled manner to a specified location in a certain time period.

“This is our fourth year of going to this competition,” West said. “This year, the robots have to pick up balls and put them into containers and do it in under two minutes and thirty seconds. They will release all these different sized plastic balls and the robot has to pick them up and throw them into different sized containers and they will get points. Montana teams tend to do very well at these competitions. It’s pretty exciting.”

According to West, the students in her robotics class have to use a special way of thinking to address engineering challenges they encounter when trying to build a robot destined for a specific task.

“They have to use critical thinking skills,” West said. “They have to learn to think abstractly. They have to think outside the box. In fact, I think there are some kids here who don’t know there is a box. They think differently and they thrive with this kind of thing. These are the kids who are going to go on and invent things. That’s what this is. It’s invention. They’re a really great bunch of kids.”

While West was making sure the two teams didn’t forget anything they would need during the competition, Lowry and his teammates, J.D. Booker and Ryan Teeter, said they were confident their robot was up to the task at hand.

Lowry said what he liked about the project was the opportunity to utilize all the skills learned during STEM work.

“We are learning engineering, mechanics and computer skills,” Lowry said. “We learn how to engineer a device every year for a different task. We learn how to program and work the electronics. It’s a lot of fun.”