Mount Si, Chief Kanim robotics teams advance to state championship
Published 4:09 pm Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Robotics teams from Mount Si High School and Chief Kanim Middle School are advancing to the FIRST Tech Challenge state championship competition Jan. 30. at the ShoWare Center in Kent. Only 32 teams of the 125 competing across the state have advanced to the state finals. This is the second year that the CKMS team has qualified for state.
To qualify for the state final competition, teams must do well in multiple categories, including robot performance, engineering work, community service, outreach efforts, and students’ ability to work as a team and form alliances.
The qualifying competition was held Jan. 17 at the Feynman Inter-league event at Wilson High School in Tacoma. Teams each played five league matches to reach the semi-final and championship matches. Both Valley teams formed alliances in the final competitions. The Mount Si team and alliance partners earned the Top Performing Alliance award at the event; the Chief Kanim team won the Connect Award for their outreach and community service work.
Members of the Mount Si team are Max Cannella, Spencer Dolecki, Shaym Gandhi, Quinn Gieseke, Tyler Grimm, Thomas Hendrick, Beau Johnson, Hans Johnson, Jessi Lelas, Preston Henning, Rahul Rajkumar, Vishnu Rathnam, Morgan Ross, Donovan See and Noah Vaughn
Members of the Chief Kanim team are Michael Albert, Nathaniel Bhend, Mathew Chow, Devin Dolecki, Vennela Kadavakollu, Sully McLaughlin, Manjesh Puram, Hari Rathnam and Aayush Singh.
In addition, Snoqualmie Elementary School has a Robotics team competing in the FIRST Lego League, a similar competition designed to introduce younger students to science and technology in a sporty atmosphere. The SES team, mentored by students from Mount Si and Chief Kanim, advanced to semi-final robotics competition Jan. 24.
Several community partnerships are helping support these student efforts. To help fund the teams’ equipment and registration costs, support has come from employee matching contributions from Microsoft, as well as community sponsors such as IGA, Ana’s Mexican Family Kitchen and Snoqualmie Dental. The training rooms at the Snoqualmie Fire Station and Police Station have been regular meeting places for the teams, especially on the evenings and weekends.
FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is a robotics competition for students in grades 7 through 12 that promotes project-based learning. To participate, students build robots that “play a game” on a 12 by 12 foot field. The 2015-2016 game, FIRST RES-Q, is modeled after actual rescue situations faced by mountain explorers all over the globe. Played by two alliances of two robots each, robots will score points by resetting rescue beacons, delivering rescue climbers to a shelter, parking on the mountain, and parking in the rescue beacon repair zone or floor goal. Robots may also score points by retrieving debris from the playing field and placing it in mountain or floor goals, and also by hanging from a pull-up bar during the last 30 seconds of a match.
The Chief Kanim Middle School robotics team qualifying for state competition include, from left: front – Sully McLaughlin, Manjesh Puram, Hari Rathnam, Vennela Kadavakollu, Michael Albert; and back – Aayush Singh, Mathew Chow, and Devin Dolecki.
Snoqualmie Elementary robotics students, with their middle school mentors.
