Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Rattler Robotics members Hamish Wilson, left, and Juan Martinez, both freshmen at Tucumcari High School, work on attaching a claw to their robot. The club will enter several robots at a competition in April in Los Lunas.
Twice a week after school, about a dozen Tucumcari High School freshmen gather in a classroom to dig into a Zip-lock bags and tangles of switches, sensors, tiny cameras and various gizmos to build autonomous robots for an upcoming competition.
They are part of the inaugural Rattler Robotics club, though its mentor, Tommy Evans, is old hat at this sort of thing.
Evans, now a history teacher at Tucumcari, previously guided a robotics club at San Jon Municipal Schools for about a dozen years and finished in the Sweet Sixteen in 2009.
Now he's taken it to Tucumcari.
Rattler Robotics students are building small robots that will be entered in a regional competition April 18, called a botball tournament, at Los Lunas against about 10 other teams, including from Estancia, Alamo Navajo, Silver and Mescalero.
The club also might compete at a more international botball tourney during the Global Conference on Educational Robotics at St. Augustine, Florida, in July, depending on whether it can scrape up enough money for the trip.
Evans said the big competition, which moves around the U.S., also draws entries from China, Dubai, Poland, Austria and United Arab Emirates, to name a few.
"This truly is an international contest," he said.
Rattler Robotics contains two teams of students working to build and program four robots that can independently navigate what appears to be a multilevel maze, pluck a few blocks or balls of certain colors, then deposit or even stack them in a designated area within two minutes. Each successfully completed task piles up points in the contest.
"It's a really complex way to score, but it's really open-ended," Evans said. "You never have two teams design their robots the same way."
Evans said most mazes are designed where a maximum of 5,000 points can be scored, but even the most advanced teams rarely score more than 2,500. Teams could win with a score as low as 100 to 500 points.
In the Tucumcari classroom Saturday, one team was using a jury-rigged Roomba vacuum cleaner for its robot. Another is attaching a motorized claw to its robot.
Evans said he occasionally gives advice to a student who's been stuck for several days trying to solve a problem. But he mostly leaves them alone to work their way out of their dilemmas.
"I can't coach them, even during competition," he said. "If something breaks on their robot, they have to fix it. If they have to reprogram their robot, they have to do it. It's all problem-solving."
