Lake Stevens students compete with nation’s best in robotics

Published 9:09 pm Monday, November 17, 2014

LAKE STEVENS — After classes, high school junior Jonah Hanson and his friends gather in a room, grab their game controllers and play for hours.

They don’t need a television, a couch or a video game system. Instead, Hanson and more than 60 other students at Cavelero Mid High School meet twice a week to work with robots they designed, programmed and built themselves.

As part of C-Bots, the school’s robotics club, teams of students between 8th and 11th grade create robots for local and state competitions. If they do well, they advance to the international VEX Robotics Competition, put on by the Robotics Education &Competition Foundation.

Three of Cavelero’s teams have competed at international tournaments in the last two years — the only robotics teams from Snohomish County to do so.

“It was so competitive, but such a great competition,” said Hanson, whose team, Trifecta, made it to the global tournament last year. “And it was an amazing environment. There were people from all over the world.”

The students hope to make it to the international competition again, but that’s just one of this year’s club goals, adviser Will Fredin said. He also aims to grow the program and focus more on teamwork along with individual improvement.

Fredin teaches science and engineering at Cavelero and is one of three advisers for the club, which started three years ago.

“We’ve gone through incredible amounts of growth,” Fredin said. “Two years ago, we had two functioning robots at state, last year we had six at the end of the season. Right now, we have 15 teams in the room.”

Students started working on their robots in October. Teams are preparing for six tournaments between now and March to determine who wins a spot at the international match in April.

In VEX competitions, teams program and build a robot to accomplish certain tasks in two-on-two matches. In this year’s game, robots score points by fitting bright yellow cylinders together to create a pole and by lifting large plastic cubes and dropping them onto posts positioned around a small arena.

“It’s fun because it gives kids a different challenge every year,” Fredin said. “They’re designing, they’re building, they’re innovating.”

This year’s game is bigger than last year’s, Hanson said. The robots have to reach higher and work with larger pieces.

Junior Jacob Sasse programmed the team’s robot. Three years ago he started teaching himself how. Since then, he’s mixed classes and summer camps with self-taught techniques.

“It’s like learning a new language so you can tell the robot what to do,” he said.

The most valuable thing he’s learned in the club, though, is how to work as part of a team, Sasse said.

Along with Trifecta, two other Cavelero teams have competed at world matches: Team Geoff and 5 Guys Robots &Fries, last year’s state champions. Sophomores Aiden Pyle, Andrew Deebach, Jordan Conner and Ryan Sybosky — the four guys who make up 5 Guys — hope to pull off another win.

Meanwhile, Team Geoff is putting the finishing touches on their robot. Most teams don’t name their bots, but Geoff is different, creators Carter Alldredge, Jacob Huber, Sean Labering and Josh Beck said. The sophomores are trying out a new design for Geoff, and they hope their creativity will pay off.

“Either your robot works, or it sits there like a brick,” Carter said.

Kari Bray: kbray@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3439.