Kids to test mettle in ’bot contest

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By Jody Ferres | Monday, February 19, 2007 11:50 PM CST | () comments

(Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Davenport West High School student Malhon Godwin, left, and retired John Deere engineer Ed Wegscheid tinker with a robot during a demonstration Sunday by the Q-C Elite Robotics Team at SouthPark Mall, Moline.

While many high school kids spend their time playing electronic games and surfing the Internet, a group of Quad-City area students are taking electronics to a whole new level.

For the past six weeks, Q-C Elite, a group of 25 students from Davenport West, Moline and Sherrard high schools, have been spending countless hours designing, building and testing a robot to compete in a national competition.

This weekend the group spent both Saturday and Sunday at SouthPark Mall in Moline demonstrating robotics and how a motor, electronic wires and pieces of sheet metal can turn into a working piece of science.

Michael LeGate, coordinator of Q-C Elite for the past five years, believes the project is top-notch for high school students around the world.

“It really teaches students a real world process,” said LeGate, who teaches computer-aided design at Sherrard (Ill.) High School. “They go from engineering, to science, math, physics, metals, tool safety and can use it to actually compete against other people.”

Q-C Elite started nine years ago and is affiliated with For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 to inspire students in science and technology.

On Jan. 6, the group traveled to the Institute of Technology in Chicago for the unveiling of FIRST’s 2007 project.

“They supply all the electronics, the motor and specific specifications that the robot can’t go over,” LeGate said.

When designing the robot, students had to consider what “game” the robot would perform. Although each year’s game varies slightly, the 2007 FIRST competition involves a 10-foot rack in the middle of the playing field. Like tick-tack-toe, the goal of “Rack ’n’ Roll” is for the robot to transport as many colored inflatable tubes to one of the 30-plus free-swinging spheres located around the rack before the opposing team puts its rings on the spheres.

“The robot has crab steering — it can move sideways and back and forth,” Sherrard junior Lacey Mandle said. “The robot can detect where the spheres are to place the rings on.”

Each round consists of two minutes and 15 seconds. In the first 15 seconds, the robot automatically aligns to a green light on the top of the tall rack without human control. For the next 2 minutes, two students operate three joysticks, which control the boom and the robot’s movement.

To keep it fair, each team must ship its robots before their respective regional competition so judges can inspect each machine to make sure it follows FIRST’s code.

Until March 15, Tyler Mills will be waiting in anticipation for his first regional competition in Chicago. Mills, a freshman at Sherrard, worked on the robot’s bumper and gearbox.

“I was expecting the process to be a lot more tedious, but it really didn’t take as long as I thought,” said Mills, who has always been interested in science and engineering. “It’s been so much fun.”

With a team of 13 professional volunteers, many of the group’s tasks don’t seem as daunting as they could be.

Bob Oestreich, a retired John Deere manufacturing engineer, has been helping the group for six years. Although Oestreich joked most of his fellow retirees spend their winters in warmer climates, he couldn’t think of a better way to spend an Iowa winter than with Q-C Elite.

“I think it helps the kids develop a sense of ownership to the project and teaches them so many trades,” he said. “I’ll never forget one time we had a girl in the group go home and fix something her mother was going to throw out because of things she’d learned in our group.”

The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.