King's Robotics teams ready to leave for world competition

Updated and corrected 4-20-2012 9:10pm 

Students and mentors work on robots in King's classroom
Photo by Steven H. Robinson

By Steven H. Robinson, with additional material from Jessica Dawson

On Tuesday, April 23,  the 17 members of the Varsity and Junior Varsity Robotics Teams from King's High School will be leaving for St. Louis, Missouri to complete in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) World Championship robotics competition.

Students Randall, Christian, and Danny with robot
Photo by Steven H. Robinson

The FIRST Tech Challenge, held from April 25 to 28, welcomes 2,100 teams and 21,000 students from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Netherlands. The FIRST Tech program provides students with hands-on science and technology experience and access to more than $9.7 million in college scholarships for 2012. 

FIRST - For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

The King's students have completed more than 14,500 person hours planning, developing and building working robots to showcase in the international competition.

Student and teacher Mike Thompson
work on robot software
Photo by Steven H. Robinson

Under the leadership of head coach and math teacher Mikel Thompson, the students are split into three teams: Building, Software and Support.  The varsity and junior varsity team will both compete as part of 128 teams from around the world.  The 128 Teams will be divided into two different sections to compete in a kind of double elimination round.  This could mean the varsity and junior varsity teams could compete with each other if they both do well.  

Last year, the King’s High School varsity team finished among the top eight teams in the world.

The Robotics team has had two mentors this year, Mike Pringle and Todd Rudberg.  Todd works for Electroimpact, in the Mukilteo area, owned by Peter Zieve. Electroimpact supported the students with company products so students were able to use commercial equipment to build their robots.

Practice arena with crates of balls
Photo by Steven H. Robinson

The competition will consist of four team robots at one time picking up three crates at different times and placing a ball in each crate until they have the three crates upright.  Then the robot will need to raise the three carts in unison to the highest extension possible, which for the King’s High School teams will be 14 feet in the air.  The different rounds last 3 minutes.

The teams gathered with their robots for one last time on Monday, April 16, before shipping the robots to Missouri.

King's High School is part of CRISTA Ministries, located in Shoreline, Washington.