Vol. 38, No. 18

3-17-2004
By: Randy Gammage

Robot creation challenges students

Central Ohio high school students are defining career paths as they team up with OSU engineering students to build robots for regional competitions this month.

Student teams from the Columbus School for Girls and Dublin’s Scioto and Coffman high schools, and a team of home schooled students, have been working with Ohio State mentors for months on the design and creation of three robots that will perform specified tasks during FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competitions.

CSG senior Gretchen Hinty is serving as team captain in her third year with FIRST. She is one of 28 girls from CSG teaming up with 25 OSU mentors this year on one robot. Working so closely with OSU upperclassmen has swayed her to favor Ohio State over Purdue as she contemplates college.

FIRST also has affected her career choices.

“Based on my involvement with FIRST, I’ve totally changed my career focus from politics and law to mechanical engineering,” Hinty said. “I realize now that I love to build things, and I love to design and create things.”

The three high school teams built their robots at various locations, including the Ohio State Center for Automotive Research (CAR) and shipped them out for competition on Feb. 26.

The CSG team won a team spirit award during a regional March 4 in Richmond, Va., but did not qualify to advance. The Dublin and home schooled teams were scheduled to compete the weekends of March 12 and March 18, respectively.

The Columbus School for Girls team and the Dublin high schools team have competed at past FIRST contests. In 2003, the CSG team advanced to the national competition, and the Dublin FIRST team won the Rookie All-Star Award at the Cleveland Regional Competition in its first year of participation.

The FIRST Robotics Competition challenges teams of students and their mentors to solve a common problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard kit of parts and a common set of rules. In its 10th year, more than 930 teams will participate nationwide and internationally, in 23 regional events and a championship event.

Teams can receive awards in many areas, including design, controls, animation and team spirit, said George Staab, faculty adviser for the FIRST Ohio State teams, and associate professor of mechanical engineering.
Participation provides a valuable learning experience for OSU students as they learn from past mistakes and sometimes apply theory not yet formally introduced to them.

“Some of our students are doing things that they haven’t even taken courses in yet,” Staab said. “They’re getting a hands-on appreciation for how multiple mechanical parts come together on a project, while in class they may be focusing on just one component.”

He said that while all FIRST teams are required to have high school members, Ohio State’s approach is somewhat unique in that high school students play a major role in the design, building and presentation of the FIRST robots. Yet Ohio State remains competitive.

“Over the years OSU has come up with a lot of unique concepts in their robot design that other teams marvel at and later adopt,” Staab said.

Ninety-five percent of the teams are corporate sponsored, said Craig Morin, senior electrical engineering major and president of OSU FIRST Robotics, which supplies the 73 OSU mentors involved.

“The argument can be made that we have no engineers on our team — we are literally a team of all students,” Morin said. “Yet our team has the edge on corporate sponsored teams because many of the engineering concepts being applied here are still fresh in our minds.”

Morin has been involved in FIRST for three years. He said the OSU mentors learn as much as the high school students.
“We’re mentoring our younger college students as much as we are our high school students,” he said.

Anna Schwinn, an OSU sophomore mechanical engineering major, has been on both sides of the fence. She participated on the CSG team in high school for two years. Now she’s in her second year of mentoring.

“It’s a bit more challenging being a mentor than a student,” she said. “As a high school student being exposed to this sort of thing for the first time, you’re basically just guessing out there. But, as a college engineering student you’re taught engineering concepts and you learn a whole new vocabulary. You have to articulate this to students in such a way that they not only can understand, but can easily apply this knowledge — and have fun at the same time.”

Since mid-January, she and her team have been working on their robot two evenings a week plus all day on Saturdays.

“They really enjoy learning this stuff — they soak it up like a sponge,” Schwinn said.

She said FIRST had everything to do with her decision to attend Ohio State. Throughout her senior year, mentors persistently encouraged her to attend OSU. One mentor took her to a GM power train seminar at Hitchcock Hall, which sparked her interest in studying mechanical engineering. Another accompanied her to the labs in Hitchcock Hall to observe the robot design project of the freshman engineering honors program.

“It was the coolest thing I had ever seen,” Schwinn said. “A year later, I was competing in that design project, and having a blast. I’m very thankful for all of that nagging.”

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