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Dominican robotics scoots to world competition
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By KIM ROBERTS
Clarion Herald
St. Mary’s Dominican High School’s robotics team, “Ultraviolet,” is the first all-girls’ team from Louisiana to advance to the world competition after placing first in March at the Louisiana FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) Regional Championship in Denham Springs.The Dominican team will compete April 17-20 against 250 teams from around the world at the FIRST Tech Challenge in Houston.
“This is the equivalent to winning a state athletic championship,” said Crissy Giacona, Dominican robotics coach.
Ultraviolet is only one of two teams that will be competing from Louisiana. The championship is the international culmination of the youth robotics competition season, an annual celebration of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). More than 40,000 people are expected to attend.
“It is a very exciting time for us,” said senior Mia Reyes, the team captain. “This is the first time a team from Dominican has qualified for worlds, and all of us are excited to be the first all-girls’ team to be making history. We have all worked very hard for this.”
Hard work pays off To get to the world competition was years in the making. According to senior Isabella Sachitano, the team got close to reaching worlds last year. “We wanted to take all that energy from last year and put it into this year,” Sachitano said. “We made a decision, as a team, and said this is what we are working for and fighting for and kicked it into high gear. That was our goal – to make it to worlds.”
When Reyes asked the team at a January meeting about its commitment to put in the extra hours necessary after school and on Saturdays to learn new skills to qualify for worlds, the team response was a unanimous “yes.”
To prepare, the Dominican team had to fine-tune its original robot through testing and incorporate physics, math, 3-D printer applications, custom-designed laser-printed pieces and watch YouTube videos to learn new skills for programming.
“The amount of math these girls did for this competition was incredible,” Giacona said. “They earned this opportunity because of their tenacity to work hard and the math behind it.”
“At the beginning of the school year (when the team registered for the competition), we found out what the game would be, and that came straight from FIRST, the company that we do robotics under,” Reyes said. “Our theme this year is ‘Center Stage,’ and it’s about trying to bring the arts into STEM. The main element of our game is a pixel – a hexagon piece that is multiple colors – and the main goal is to pick up the pixel with a robotic arm and put it on the backdrop.”
Along with completing the pixel activity, teams were allowed to launch a paper airplane from the robot.
“Ours works really well,” Reyes said. “We launch it from behind the bars and launch it over a structure, and it lands in a taped-off area. We get points for each action completed successfully.”
Trying new strategies Giacona said her students did something different this year – breaking up the robot responsibilities into distinct components.
“There was a team that worked on each section of the robot and not just one person was in charge of everything,” Giacona said. “They were always helping each other and working together. It worked really well, and they were able to communicate as a team. One person was not stressed out trying to get everything done.”
This year’s team also employed new strategies when planning the programming and execution of their robot for competition.
“They were strategic and knew they could get a lot more points if they could detect this object and put the pixel on the right place on the field,” coach Matthew Foss said. “We realized it was something the programmers could do with the knowledge and equipment that we had; it would just take a little time. The programmers met with me and figured out how to do it.”
The Ultraviolet team is looking forward to the overall experience and meeting worldwide teams and people in Houston.
“For the seniors on the team, this is literally awesome,” said team member Meredith Konochek. “We are so proud to represent Dominican. What better way to end senior year? When we return from competition, we have just two weeks left of school.”