Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor
Robots will take over at Queensbbury school on Saturday, but no need for alarm. It’s just the VEX Robotics Northern NY State Tournament, taking place here for the first time, as Queensbury and other local schools have launched and grown their robotics programs to the point that warrants hosting the event.
Some 330 students — 215 high schoolers and 115 fourth to eighth graders — will compete on nearly 85 teams, with 70 volunteers and as many as 2,000 spectators, says organizer Eric Wood.
Mr. Wood, who is president of Finch Paper, got involved five years ago when his now eighth-grade daughter joined Queensbury’s then-new robotics program, just as the school was switching from Lego Robotics to the VEX system.
“I’m an electrical engineer by degree and a manufacturing guy by trade, but I had never been involved with robotics,” he says. He learned along with the students.
“If you’re going to develop a program and make a magnitude, you need more local events. I realized that this was a short term game unless we built infrastructure right here. So I reached out to, oh, 10 local schools through connections.”
“Glens Falls and Hudson Falls bit first,” and now Lake George and Saratoga also have several teams, although Saratoga’s program is not directly affiliated with the school, he adds.
Now they’re hosting local tournaments with local teams and others coming from as far as New Jersey or, last week, Washington State, “of all places.”
As with the Public High School Basketball Tournament — “on a smaller scale,” Mr. Wood says — there’s a bidding process for the state tournament.
It took place for a decade in Syracuse, but Mr. Wood said that when their organizer retired, “I put Queensbury in the mix,” offering to run both the high school and middle school events under one roof.
That, “and the fact we are showing noticeable growth in the region, and we are committed to it,” with even more schools planning to field teams next year, was persuasive. “Long story short, we were selected to run the event.”
How it works
A competition is unveiled each spring, Mr. Wood explains. “From May all the way until March, we’re learning about engineering skills, about principles of building and robotics, and then these robots perform functions at the events.”
Teams win trophies for everything from the notebooks they’ve kept recording their work, interviews, and of course, “the actual robots doing stuff.”
At the middle school level, he says, “The focus is on collaboration between robots. You and another robot are working together to complete tasks, stuff like moving blocks around buckets, or emptying boxes out of a bucket.
“The high school level is more competitive. It’s not BattleBots. But…the robots are blocking and defending each other. They write programming code to have the robots do stuff without controllers, but a lot of times, they’re operating the robot with what you would envision looks like a PlayStation or Xbox controller.”
Some teams build one robot and tweak it through the year. Others, Mr. Wood said, “They’re building brand-new robots. These guys can now build robots in a matter of days, from scratch, the advanced teams. Queensbury has 10 teams total. Two or three, I could drop the robot on the ground and they can build a different robot from scratch to play the same game and tweak it as they go.”
“There are four robots on the field at the same time,” two per team, red and blue, Mr. Wood said. “Whoever scores the most points wins that competition. And there’s 100 of these competitions throughout the day,” with each team rotating in about every half hour, he said.
“At the state level, it gets as intense as us nerds can get,” Mr. Wood says.
“If you’re there on Saturday and stay for finals, they’ll be plenty of crying,” he said. “They have put their body and soul into this, in some cases, four to 10 hours a week, every week.
“This is like any sport. You’ve worked your entire season all for this. You’re at the state tournament, and the other team scores more than you….Or if you score more than them — I mean, the exhilaration is amazing.”
“Not only is winning awesome,” Mr. Wood says, “but with this tournament comes automatic bids to the world tournament in Dallas, Texas,” in May — four middle-elementary school and five high school teams, he said.
“The goal is to continue to grow this program in New York and thus, continuing to grow the size of this tournament.”
“We always complain in manufacturing about not having enough people to come work in our facilities. But are we doing anything ourselves to provide the solution? This is our contribution to the community. A good portion of these kids are gonna go out into STEM-based fields. The more we can promote and grow this, it creates all those future opportunities.
“Some kids, mine included, would naturally get STEM connections. We’re trying to touch those who maybe won’t. This is how we can grow the field.”
Companies providing volunteers include event sponsor Rozell Industries, Finch Paper, General Electric, Haanen Engineering, Miller Mechanical, McFarland Johnson, BOCES, the participating schools plus South Glens Falls and Salem. Also, the robotics team from Worchester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, will be there to meet with students.
Spectators welcome, free: The New York State VEX Robotics Tournament is Saturday, March 9, in the two Queensbury High School gyms. Qualification rounds begin at 9 a.m., Skills Challenges at 9:30. The one-hour lunch break starts at 11:30. Finals begin at 2:45 p.m., with awards at 3:15.
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