It’s been well over a year since the last time the Macon Bots robotics team went to a competition. For most of 2020, the team was one of many groups whose schedules were decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This semester, however, the group is back and doing things differently.
Macon County Schools STEM coordinator Jennifer Love said the pandemic slammed the breaks on everything she had planned for the robotics team last year. While some student athletes could continue to practice because of outdoor social distancing opportunities and many clubs could create a reasonable facsimile of their normal routines online, the Macon Bots depend heavily on expensive equipment and their dedicated work space. As a result, competitions, fun group activities and even basic meetings became impossible.
“When I first came back here, it was like opening up a time capsule,” Love said. “We had permission slips for a field trip and T-shirt orders lying around and a half-built robot we never got to complete. It was like everything froze in place when COVID-19 hit.”
In the last few months, vaccination rates have picked up at the national, state and local levels, leading to the rollback of most coronavirus-related restrictions. It didn’t happen fast enough to take part in a full season of the FIRST Robotics Competition, so Love saw the perfect opportunity to mix things up. For the past several weeks, she and the returning team members have begun studying a new format – the SkillsUSA Urban Search & Rescue Challenge.
Competing in conjunction with Macon County Schools’ SkillsUSA students, the Macon Bots will now use TETRIX MAX kits to build robots that can perform tasks related to real world disaster relief. Contrary to FIRST’s competition, in which each team has one big robot that everyone has a job in building and maintaining, this competition requires multiple smaller robots that smaller groups work on from start to finish. Not only is this format cheaper to participate in, it offers team members a more comprehensive look at the automation process.
“Mechanical, electrical, programming… this way exposes all of the students to all of the fields,” team mentor Bob Vogel said. “I think it’s a more effective way to do things.”
For now, the team members are focused on getting back into the swing of things. Thanks to a generous grant from the Appalachian Resource Commission, they’ll be expanding into a new unit at the Business Park to set up an arena space. Some of them are trying robotics for the first time, while others are adapting to the new competition style, so everyone is learning something new together.
“Last time around, you had the big robot that everyone worked on and it was all built to spec,” Macon Early College junior Jon Huscusson said. “This is back to basics. Everyone is learning the fundamentals.”
That fact also makes now as good a time as any for interested students to get started.
“Anybody can learn this stuff,” MEC junior Muhammad Patel said. “It helps to already have an interest in it, but anybody can learn.”
The club will stop meeting again when school lets out for the summer and will resume in the next school year. Love says that 2022 is the earliest that the team can expect to compete again. With the amount of preparation they’re putting in ahead of time, however, she thinks they’ll be in good shape.
“In January, when we get the challenge for the year, we want to make sure we’re ready,” Love said.
The last Macon Bots meeting of the school year will be on May 15 at 3:30 p.m. For more information, contact Jennifer Love by calling the Macon County Schools central office at (828) 524-3314 or emailing jennifer.love@macon.k12.nc.us.