ST. ALBANS, W.Va. — Students in Kanawha County are putting their math and science skills to the test this week to compete in a robotics tournament.
“It facilitates social interaction. It also involves mechanical engineering, math, science, technology — all of those aspects are compacted into one program,” said Cody Clay, elementary robotics coordinator for KCS. “Students learn how to become software engineers essentially.”
Elementary student teams from the St. Albans and Riverside feeder areas were at St. Albans High School Thursday for several matches. A county-wide robotics competition for all grade levels is set for Saturday at the Coonskin Air Guard base.
VEX IQ is the program for elementary and VRC is the program for middle and high school robotics. KCS is in its first year of a VEX IQ/VRC grant to bring robotics to each school in the county.
Clay said students are taught how to control a robot.
“They have a 60 second time frame to work with that team to gather as many rings on scoring posts and areas that they can,” he explained.
Mikenna Marion, a 4th grader at Midland Trail Elementary School, said her team ran into several problems at first.
“When we control the robot, we have a claw. Our old claw would not exactly grab rings as we would want it to do. We modified the claw so it would work better,” she said.
The students told MetroNews the competition taught them how to work together.
“You learn a lot of partnerships,” said Riley Gilmore, a 4th grader.
“You learn mistakes from your actions,” another student said.
Marion said there’s no right way to control a robot. A lot of the time, she had to think outside the box.
“You can be very creative with it,” she said. “You can do anything with technology once you put your mind to it with your imagination.”
In all, 15 elementary, middle and high schools from across the region with nearly 26 teams are competing.
Saturday’s county-wide competition starts at 9 a.m. at the 130th Air Lift Wing in Charleston.
Any team that competes in a county-level competition will be qualified to compete at the state competition in Fairmont on March 3.