Robotics teams vie at Clarkson

POTSDAM — At the FIRST Robotics Competition, students get creative with math, mechanics and more.

Take Colton-Pierrepont Central School's team of ninth-graders. Self-dubbed the "Nerd Herd," the students wore green team T-shirts with a bespectacled cartoon logo Friday to Clarkson University's Walker Center. Then they put their robot to the test.

"I'm pretty excited. It's fun to figure out how things work together," team member Alex J. Bonno said.

The Colton-Pierrepont students named their robot "Rock Lobster," after the B-52's song — and in honor of their creation's long, claw-like arm. They even brought a plastic lobster complete with sunglasses to the competition.

"I wish they'd spend as much time on the robot as they did on the theme," the team's adviser, Gilbert F. Stankiewicz, who teaches math and computing as well as a robotics class at Colton-Pierrepont, said with a laugh. "But seriously, these are some really bright kids who spent a lot of time working on this, and they couldn't have done it without Clarkson University. They wouldn't get to experience programming at this level without this kind of thing."

More than 200 students on 22 teams competed at the second annual tournament. It was also the first time Clarkson has hosted a regional competition, attracting several teams from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Western New York as well as many north country districts.

The "Face-Off" Challenge called for students to design, build and program robots that could navigate a variety of surfaces while grabbing hockey pucks and placing them in a center goal to score points.

"Our robot holds hopefully 16 pucks. Then we guide them into the goal. That's the basic idea," said Scott R. Goldstein, a senior at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends School, which had two teams at Friday's competition. "The first time I ever went to a robotics scrimmage, I absolutely loved it. It's a lot of fun."

Using the building blocks of engineering — simple machines — students learn how to solve problems and work together, on top of gaining an appreciation for math and science.

That's the principle behind For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, the organization behind this weekend's competitions, as well as the national leagues in which Clarkson's college and high school teams compete.

"This program has brought excitement in science and engineering, and that's translating into more people going into those careers," Clarkson President Anthony G. Collins said.

Teams sized up their competition as they entered the arena, mostly by the size of their robot, although pretty much everyone seemed to envy a Rochester team's long white lab coats.

"We start scouting, and when we see a team that can drop eight or nine pucks at a time, they're the ones to beat," said Steven Robert, the adviser to Massena Central School's team, who helped set up the arena starting at 3 a.m. Friday.

Two hundred more students will crowd the arena floor today, as the FIRST Lego League Competition gets under way. The "Climate Connections" challenge calls for 9- to 14-year-old children to research and present a solution to global warming using Legos.