John Jay's Robotics Teams Head to Regionals
John Jay’s two robotics teams—the Indians and Metal Benders—placed first and second in the Hudson Valley regional qualifier of the FIRST Tech Challenge held at Yonkers’ Riverside High School on January 20. Both will proceed to the regional championships at Pace University on Sunday, February 11. In addition, the Indians won the PTC Design Award, given to the team that best incorporated industrial design elements into their solution.
Both teams are members of John Jay High School’s robotics classes and the Robotics Club.
John Jay's Robotics Teams
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The Indians: Henry DeGrasse, Will Kennedy, Bohden Landis, Tommy Pickup, Conor Roberts, Marc Skriloff, and Alex Stark.
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Metal Benders: Juan Hefferan, Dimitri Bellassakos, David Brandwien, Jack Finney, Steve Fisher, Chris Munoz, and Andrew Simmes.
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Hard Work + Technology Education
Steve Zoeller, who teaches design, robotics, and engineering at John Jay High School, credits the success of the robotics teams to creativity, persistence, and collaboration as well as technology education.
“The students have been working hard in class, after school during Robotics Club, and at monthly weekend builds,” said Zoeller. “They even took the robots home during breaks and snow days to get a competitive edge. These students have built the most reliable robots of all the teams I have mentored over the last ten years.”
Technology education at John Jay has also evolved over the last few years. The department has implemented four-year sequences in design, engineering, and computer science. Robotics is a capstone class that allows students to apply what they've learned throughout high school.
“The success of the robots’ autonomous mode in competition was that the software engineers came into robotics class knowing how to code in Java after taking some of our programming classes,” said Zoeller. “They built innovative, highly reliable, engineering marvels. I am so proud of them!"
Creativity + Collaboration
Tournaments are Ten-hour Events
FIRST Tech Challenge tournaments are ten-hour events. They begin with an inspection of the robots’ hardware and software and a fifteen-minute interview by a panel of judges, followed by a series of matches in which robots complete a number of tasks.
- During the thirty-second autonomous mode, students’ preprogrammed robots attempt to knock off the opposing team’s “jewel” determined by the use of a color sensor, and use an Android camera, encoders, and distance sensors to determine which column to place a cube called a glyph into a “Crytopbox” and park in a safe zone.
- During the two-minute tele-op mode, students control the robot with game controllers to collect glyphs and fill a Cryptobox with twelve blocks. Bonuses are awarded for filling them in a specific pattern.
- In a complicated alliance strategy session, the four top teams had to collaborate with other teams. While the two John Jay teams hoped to ally with The Techno Chix, the Girl Scouts of the Hudson Valley's team, they were selected by another alliance. John Jay partnered with the Mamaroneck Tigers and were undefeated in the final rounds to win the event.
First Tech Challenge
FIRST Tech Challenge is an international high school robotics competition for students in grades 7 - 12. FIRST stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.” Students design and build a robot using aluminum, polycarbonate, motors and servos, sensors, and a variety of other materials. They program and control it using Android Smartphones with Java or AppInventor.