Windham High School's robotics team is currently in the process of preparing for an upcoming competition to take place on Feb. 1 at Scarborough High School.
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| Windham High Schoool senior Chessie Lomonte serves as team captain for the WHS robotics team, which is currently preparing for the VEX V5RC event to be held at Scarborough High School on Saturday, Feb. 1. PHOTO BY JOLENE BAILEY |
“It's a learning opportunity; students get ideas for how they might want to improve their robot, by building and/or programming based on how their robot performed compared to other teams,” said Michelle Lane, the WHS robotic team’s advisor. “Students gain confidence in parts of their robot that completes the task well and discuss what they can improve. The teams continue going through the engineering design process and improve their robot for the next competition.”
Team members are eagerly looking forward to the competition.
“We are hoping to win. While in the past many of our awards have come from capturing the spirit of the competition or our Engineering Design Notebooks. We would love to bring home a few more trophies that show just how good of a team we can be on the field,” said Chessie Lomonte, a senior at WHS and team captain.
The WHS robotics team has brought home 11 trophies in the last three years, one of them coming from an international competition.
“I have been a part of the WHS Robotics program for four years now and honestly it has blessed my life so much,” said Lomonte. “We have such a great community, and we're all able to just be silly together. Having an organization as small as ours, we often get looked over at competitions and seen as an easy win, but over the course of my time in the program, Windham has proved that we are a force to be reckoned with.”
Serving as the robotic team advisor comes naturally to Lane.
“As a child I always gravitated toward the STEM fields and working with my hands,” she said. “I enjoy the challenge that these areas offer. I enjoy coming up with solutions and thinking critically.”
Long before Lomonte’s freshman year in high school, she showed a commitment to being a part of a team and someone who truly enjoys robotics.
“I competed in the first Lego League in middle school, which is entirely different from VEX V5RC, which is what I compete in now,” Lomonte said. “They're about as similar as soccer and basketball. They use different operating systems, different materials, different rules, and different game structures, and different age groups, but my love for robotics has strengthened from this event.”
The VEX V5RC competition’s main goal is to address “the STEM problem.” Lane said this competition exists to solve the conversional idea that there will not be enough teaching of traditional methods when addressing science, technology, engineering, and math to adequately prepare students for the complexity in the world.
STEM topics many students find difficult to understand and be interested in and the VEX V5RC competition works toward finding certain skills and passions necessary to gain the proper education to better the productive and overall outcome for student’s lives.
This competition shows skills enhanced in a different manner than in a classroom such as teamwork, problem solving, and scientific discovery. The study of competitive robotics encompasses aspects of STEM through the engineering design and overall process.
“We've spent the time in between events working to fortify our robot, incorporate new elements to hopefully score some more points, as well as getting our subsystems more consistent in scoring points,” Lomonte said. “We are also going to try to up our game with our autonomous portions. For each V5RC match, there is a short time in the beginning where robots operate without the input of a human known as the autonomous period. In the past, our autonomous was put together at the last minute and it hasn't been particularly good, but now we have plans for a much more consistent and high scoring autonomous.”
Robotic competitions are often defined as electrifying and competitive.
“Being the robotics coach is a rewarding experience. It's amazing to watch the students apply concepts they learn in their classes and from going through the engineering design process to build their robot,” Lane said. “Seeing student growth over the four years that they are involved with the team, including social, intellectual, and technical makes it worth all the time that is takes to be a coach. It is also amazing to watch the students overcome various challenges from being able to modify their robot in 10 minutes if needed between matches to finding and fixing programming errors quickly.”
While this robotics competition is one of the last that WHS seniors will take on, that has not stopped Lomonte from furthering her passion for engineering.
“I have yet to pick a university for next year, but I plan on studying robotics engineering in higher education, and I would ideally like to have a career in robotics, but that is in the future,” she said. <
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