Building for a future world

Published 12:01 am Wednesday, February 16, 2011

MOUNTLAKE TERRACE — When he was younger, Michael Sorensen, 16, took things apart and tried to put them back together.

He was good at the one.

“But not at putting things back together,” he quipped.

Now, he is part of the Mountlake Terrace High School robotics team, called “Chill

Out!,” that is building a 120-pound robot capable of racing down a field, and picking up and carrying inflated plastic triangles, circles and squares. They’re also building a remote-controlled mini-robot that can climb a 10-foot steel pole within seconds.

The team’s robots will face off against more than 80 other high schools around Washington — about 100 teams total — at a competition March 17-19 at Qwest Field Event Center in Seattle. The team has six weeks to complete the robots and must ship them on Tuesday.

Tyler Baker, 18, the team’s go-to guy, said competition officials stress “gracious professionalism.” Participants are expected to be respectful and help one another out.

The team spends at least 35 hours per week outside of school in the shop, building prototypes of their ideas, creating 3-D computer-aided design renderings, manufacturing parts, assembling the robots, wiring and programming them and troubleshooting optical tracking and camera-based targeting systems.

“We’re a bunch of high school students with six weeks and we just do it,” Michael said.

How do they balance school, the team and their friends and family?

“Caffeine,” Michael said.

“You just do it,” said Trevor Larsen, 17. He attends Meadowdale High School in Lynnwood and wanted to join Mountlake Terrace’s team.

“I felt completely at home here,” he said. “I’m always building stuff with my hands.”

This is Trevor’s first year on the team.

“There’s a lot of trial and error,” Trevor said. “Some days there’s more error than trial.”

Teams from across Snohomish County are frantically finishing up their robots this week. In Marysville on Tuesday, students worked in smaller groups on this year’s robot in the manufacturing lab at Totem Middle School.

“We’re down to our final week so everyone, to say the least, is sleep deprived,” said Matt Chonka, a science teacher and Arts and Technology High School Robotics Team adviser. “It’s crunch time.”

Junior Austin Chrisman, 17, and senior Jonathan Gutenkauf, 17, looked over honeycomb composite boards and aluminum that will be turned into their robot’s appendage, an arm that must have the ability to reach 8 feet.

“Aluminum is so difficult,” said Jonathan, a three-year member of the robotics team and main welder. “I’m looking forward now to making sure we get the whole robot done.”

The team is ahead of where they typically are at this point in the build season, according to senior Hailey Wang, who serves as project manager for the team.

“Hopefully we’ll have a robot by the end of this week,” said Hailey, 17. “It’s incredibly inspiring … we’re learning skills that are going to be equitable to anything we choose to do in the future.”

The team is like a small family, she added, and has an “infectious nature” that has caused it to double in size every year.

Community service and fundraising play a major role in belonging to the teams.

The Mountlake Terrace team has hosted a regional event FIRST Lego League, a competition for fourth- through eighth-graders to create Lego block-based robots to complete tasks on a themed playing surface.

Additionally, the team has volunteered for the Shoreline-based Food Lifeline food bank and donated blood and supported local events such as the Edmonds Street Strut. Last week, the team made 200 sandwiches to help Heroes for the Homeless, a King County-based nonprofit which aims to help feed the homeless.

During competitions, the team is expected to act as mentors to rookie teams and younger competitors — a role “Chill Out!” gladly accepts. The team mentors students at South County-based Cedar Park Christian School and helped start robotics teams at schools in Lynnwood and Shoreline.

“We give kids a chance to learn about it, the chance we didn’t get,” Trevor said.

Tyler said he’s always been interested in engineering and technology. In college, he plans to pursue mechanical engineering.

“We’re the next generation,” Tyler said. “We’ll be making the next cars and highways.”

Reporter Amy Daybert contributed to this report.