After many hours of planning, designing, building their robot, and competing in regional robotics competitions, a team of students from across northwest Arkansas and their robot earned the chance to return for the second year in a row to compete against the best robotics teams in the world at the First Robotics Competition Championships in St. Louis, Mo.
Team 5006 from Prairie Grove is a second-year team competing in the First Robotics Competition against many teams with a lot more experience and resources, but that has not kept them from finding a way to impress the judges enough for a repeat visit to the championships and walking away with a coveted award.
The First Robotics Competition program is a worldwide organization with more than 3,000 active teams. The goal of the program is to encourage young people into science, technology, engineering or math related careers. The program also is about setting up a system that encourages young people to develop practical teamwork skills, cooperation and gracious professionalism.
Team 5006, named Team Apophis after an ancient Egyptian deity who embodies chaos and appears in art as a giant serpent, is a small community-based robotics team. Members are a diverse group, 8th-12th grade students from Haas Hall Academy, Prairie Grove High School and homeschool backgrounds. The group meets in a workshop at Rcal Products in Prairie Grove twice a week, every week. Their mentor and sponsor is Rudy Timmerman, a Prairie Grove business owner and engineer, who was so impressed with the robotics organization that he started a team in 2013.
In 2014, Team 5006 won the Rookie All Star award at the Searcy Regional. This achievement won the team a chance to compete at the 2014 First Robotics World competition, where they brought home the Rookie All Star award. This is the most prestigious award that a firstyear team can receive. It indicates that the team is of great worth and has the impressive appearance of a veteran team.
Each robotics team is given only six weeks to design, build and test a robot to complete a specific challenge. This year's challenge was called Recycle Rush and teams had to work together to stack as many totes and 40 gallon trash cans as they could in two and a half minutes.
This year, no longer rookies, the team had to compete on equal footing with teams whose programs have huge budgets, and have been successfully competing for almost 20 years. Despite the challenges, Apophis won the Engineering Inspiration Award at the Oklahoma City Regional, a prize which won the team a spot to compete in the 2015 World Championship in St. Louis.
The First World Championship event draws competitors from over 20 countries and fills the Edward Jones Football Stadium with over 15,000 highly motivated high school students. There were an estimated 43,000 people in attendance at the competition this year. There were over 600 teams, divided into 6 divisions. Team 5006 competed with 100 teams for a handful of awards. The team's engineering innovations, local community achievements and international work were recognized with the "Gracious Professionalism Award" at the world championship this year.
The judges were impressed with the team's work with Designs for Hope to make bicycle generator boards which are sent to Africa to power small electronics during the night. The team designed the circuit boards and makes them for only the sum of the parts. This summer, two team members are headed to Uganda to hand out these generator boards to people in need.
Team sponsors this year were Haas Hall Academy, Rcal Products, Arkansas Wind and Solara and NASA.
General News on 07/22/2015