By Greta Haroldson / Features Editor
The windows of the Harpeth Hall robotics room are blinding against the early evening sky, but the spirits of the 991P Pasta robotics team couldn’t be dimmer. Two girls stare down a broken robot, toolless, mentor-less and bordering on hopeless. The long-awaited competition? It’s tomorrow.
Weeks later, Bronwyn Massey peeks her head into the middle school meeting room, during Naiya Patel’s interview with Logos, cutting off her teammate Naiya’s thrilling recounting of the hours before her first Upper School robotics competition. Bronwyn joins the conversation. Bronwyn and Naiya are two of six members of the Class of 2030 who have joined the Upper School robotics program, and the duo competed together at the Spring Trevecca robotics competition on Feb. 7.
Those who have been in the BBIL in the past months may have wondered why there are so many young faces in the robotics room this year. Aren’t middle schoolers supposed to be confined to the library basement, working on Lego robots instead of handling electric saws?
Ms. Kelly Huddleston, Upper School robotics coach, explained, “Our high school robotics program, VEX, offers significantly more opportunity for the students. In Lego robotics, kids have maybe one or two competitions per year and only a few tries to do their challenge at each tournament. And then that’s it.”
Upper School robotics, meanwhile, has over six competitions per year, with at least seven opportunities to drive the robot at each one. The robots are also highly customizable, each made out of aluminum and steel bars that are cut and shaped to create each mechanism.
The added complexities of Upper School robotics have been welcome challenges for the eighth graders. Amelia Hitt, member of team 991E DangEr: Falling Objects, said, “I really like that we can rebuild our own robots and that we go to multiple competitions. I feel like it’s just been more interesting, though also really different, I guess, than in middle school.”
The robotics children, as the Upper Schoolers lovingly refer to them, began their Upper School robotics journey midway through the first semester of this year with a robot called the Hero Bot. The Hero Bot is a set of instructions for a beginner robot design released by VEX Robotics, designed to help new teams get started. The instructions aren’t what you’d call clear; they come purposefully designed to have plenty of room for improvement, so there was need for innovation at the very beginning of the building process.
“We all figured out that the eighth graders needed to overcome how the Hero Bots aren’t constructed in the most rigorous way,” said volunteer robotics coach Mr. Caleb Huddleston. “They had to create their own solutions to a lot of those problems.”
Building the Hero Bots introduced the eighth graders to newfound challenges: the engineering design process, advanced problem solving and managing teamwork while on different schedules. “We used that experience to assess where each new eighth grader would shine,”said Mr. Huddleston. “What their talents were in building those robots, and in driving and programming them. And then we sorted them into teams.”
Two new teams were formed for the eighth graders: 991P Pasta and 991Y Yodeling Yaks. Naiya Patel, Simran Purohit and Maddie Wright joined 991P, led by team leader and junior Sophie Hong, while Margaret Meyer, Evelyn Levy and Bronwyn Massey joined 991Y. Amelia Hitt joined the pre-existing team 991E alongside three juniors.
By the time teams were finalized in late November, the robotics season was picking up, and every team fell into a whirlwind of building and coding in preparation for the upcoming competitions. 991E’s January competition was just around the corner, and Amelia and junior Cora Meyer had to be ready to compete while their teammates cheered on from across the country during Winterim.
Despite her first competition being with only half the team, Amelia excelled. When she took on the roles of the missing team members all at once, anyone would have expected the eighth grader to feel a bit out of her depth, yet Mr. Huddleston reported that she “took to it like a duck to water.”
991E was ecstatic about Amelia’s success, but anxiety was building across the robotics room table. The unfortunate timing of a Middle School musical had cut down a lot of after-school time for the eighth graders, leaving the robots less competition-ready than either team had hoped. By the end of Winterim, the teams had a mere two weeks to prepare for the competition at Trevecca Nazarene University, and the ice-storm that descended upon Tennessee had already taken one of them away.
The final week before Trevecca was fraught. Bronwyn, Maddie, Hong and Naiya joined forces as a hybrid team while the rest of 991Y and 991P were busy with other extracurricular commitments. “It was very stressful, to be honest,” Naiya admitted. “Once we knew we were losing a week, we had to have a new plan, because we knew we couldn’t do all the stuff we wanted to do. It was crunch time.”
By Friday afternoon, the team had pulled it off. Their robot was fast, well-built and able to score — until, in a moment the entire team shudders to recall today, Naiya accidentally shattered the robot’s plastic ramp while driving for the very first time. Crunch time, indeed.
Spirits were low. The competition was tomorrow, the BBIL closed in just one hour, and, to make things worse, the coaches and other teams had left to drop off all the tools at Trevecca. Hong and Naiya were alone in a room with a broken robot and no obvious way to fix it.
Until it hit Naiya — not all hope was lost. In a moment of sheer ingenuity, the eighth grader realized that, while they couldn’t drill holes into their plastic without a drill, they could use the pre-drilled sheets of aluminum; and while they didn’t have a hammer to shape it, Hong’s water bottle did look suspiciously hammer-like.
Against all odds, the solution worked perfectly. “That was a moment of us being pretty resourceful,” Naiya said, “because we didn’t really have anything else to use. Everybody in Bullard looked at us like we were insane, but it was actually really fun.”
Finally, the competition was upon them. Expectations weren’t high; all in all, the team had only had a week of building time and less than an hour of drive practice. But there was an undeniable buzz in the air for 991P, formed from a delirious week of building and coding nonstop. “Our work had finally paid off, and we just got to enjoy it,” Naiya said.
Trevecca had seven qualification rounds, and 991P was ready to accept potentially winning none of them. Depending on what teams were randomly assigned to be their opponents or alliance partners, the level of competition could be somewhat low or extremely high. It was anyone’s guess.
991P and their alliance partners put their robots down on the field and waited for the match to start. “I was shaking,” Naiya said. “It was three, two, one, and I’m like, oh God, here we go.”
Yet in their very first match, one they were predicted to lose, 991P wasn’t just scoring— they were winning. “I was driving around, trying to focus on so many things and also listen to Sophie in my right ear,” said Naiya. And drive she did; despite their robot only being able to score on one goal out of four, the team won 36 to 0. The team went on to win one match and tie another, a resounding success for the team. “It was like, whoa, we can do this,” Bronwyn said.
The team then went on to score a total of 41 points in skills, a category of the competition where teams show off their coding and building individually. “With the time that they had, it completely exceeded my expectations,” said Mr. Huddleston. The score was high enough to potentially qualify the team for states, performing well above the expected capabilities of their robot.
“They have really given me a lot of hope for the future of this program,” said Mr. Huddleston. “They’re just going to be phenomenal, I’m sure.”
