The Riverdale Rams Robotics team | Facebook / Riverdale Robotics
The Riverdale Rams Robotics team | Facebook / Riverdale Robotics
The Riverdale FIRST Robotics team presented its program to the Riverdale School Board at the board's Jan. 23 meeting.
The Robotics Rams are competing in their 11th year as an FCC robotics team. They finished their last season with a record of 21-2. This year they have their eyes set on the state competition.
“I'm sure we've all heard of Battle Bots before the TV show, but before you get too excited, that's not quite what we do,” Tyler Lockaby, a Riverdale High School student, said during the meeting. “I like to think that our game involves much more skill and strategy to compete in. FIRST robotics is a global robotics community that prepares young people for the future and inspires them to be science and technology leaders and innovators by engaging them in programs to build science engineering and technology skills. These skills inspire innovation and foster well-rounded life abilities, including self-confidence, communication and leadership.”
The board uploaded a livestream of its public meeting to the district’s YouTube channel.
The high school added robotics as a class last year. Although it wasn't added in time to make it into the regular course program, the school was able to get some of the students interested in robotics into the class. The school will continue robotics as a class next year and will most likely have a much larger group of students.
The board was told the Robotics class has helped raise $25,000 in grants. They also started two Lego leagues in the community, which is a robotics team that makes their robots completely out of Legos. The younger teams were coached by the Rams and enjoyed the summer camp experience.
The team explained to the board some of the coding and design skills that they have honed through this process, and then gave the board a detailed explanation of the robot they built for the Beacon Challenge they faced this year. They said one of the hardest portions of the game was the first 30 seconds, known as the autonomous period, where they are not allowed to touch the controls and have to allow the robot to act out exactly what they programmed it to do beforehand without any intervention.
In other business, the board discussed approving its kindergarten addition and 3rd – 5th grade renovation plan, and approving Fineline Construction to complete the ceiling grid and lights in the Middle School hallways.
The board will meet again at 7 p.m. on Feb. 27 at the Riverdale High School library on 9622 256th Street North.
Alerts Sign-up