CMHS STEM Club Designs, Builds Innovative Robot
MILESBURG – On May 1st the Central Mountain High School (CMHS) STEM Club traveled to Bald Eagle Area High School to compete in the 2018 Sea, Air, and Land Engineering Competition developed by Penn State Electro-Optics Center and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Students were tasked with designing and building robots to complete challenges based on situations that the military or emergency first-responders might encounter.
CMHS STEM Club students chose to compete in the land portion of the challenge. The goal was to create an autonomous vehicle that could locate and deliver payloads to specific drop locations. During the competition, students maneuvered a robot around obstacles in a ten by ten box while locating cubes of different sizes and weights. The catch, students could only look through a video screen, the cubes were delivered to designated drop points. Competitors could not operate the vehicle.
Meeting before school, three days a week from January to May, the STEM Club engineered and built their unique land robot with guidance from Mr. Jason Brown, a software engineer, and parent volunteer, Fred Hoy, drafting and design teacher at Central Mountain High School, and Marcie Walizer, CMHS STEM Club advisor and CMHS science teacher. The process of building the robot taught students how to follow a timeline, keep track of their progress, budget, fundraise, plan meetings, problem solve and overcome obstacles. The cost of the robot could not exceed $500, and with generous support from First Quality, the club was able to compete.
Many problems required the group to stop and contemplate a solution. As Mr. Brown noted, “Perhaps the most important take away from the whole experience should be we learn more from our failures than our successes. Every time we had to solve a problem we learned something and we solved a boat load of problems.”
The CMHS STEM Club competed against 18 robots in the Sea, Air and Land competition and received the award for Best Innovation for their efforts.
