The team uses its special designed robot to compete against other high schools and uses skills learned to help better the local community.
For the first time since 2013, the Lenape Regional High School District’s Storm Robotics team will compete on the world stage at the FIRST Robotics Championship in Detroit from April 25 through April 28.
FIRST Robotics Competition is the international organization that oversees high school robotics competitions throughout the world.
Through FIRST, high school students build robots specialized to compete in games where the robots must complete specific, varying tasks each year, such as hanging on bars, picking up blocks, moving balls or flying discs into goals, balancing on beams and more.
With nearly 40 students from Lenape and Cherokee high schools on the Storm Robotics team, students can serve in capacities such as mechanical work, software design, electrical wiring or business and marketing.
In addition to building robots to excel in competition, teams are also judged on their ability to create a program that will improve their local communities.
Similar to high school sports, FIRST Robotics competitions are structured with local competitions, district competitions and district championships.
While the Storm’s robot, named Jupiter this year, performed well against the competition at various meets, it was the team’s community outreach that put the team over the top and sent the Storm students to Detroit for the championship.
Lauren Johnston, a Cherokee senior and member of the team’s business and marketing division, noted this year Storm won the “Regional Engineering Inspiration Award” at the Mid-Atlantic competition, which automatically qualified the team to compete in Detroit.
This year, Johnston said the team had several community outreach initiatives, such as its Storm for Storm Relief drive where the students collected 120 pounds of toiletries for those in Puerto Rico affected by Hurricane Maria.
Johnston also pointed to the team’s crayon initiative, where the team has been melting crayons to recast in specifically designed molds to make the crayons easier to use by special needs students who lack fine motor skills.
“We have all of these initiatives where we try to use our engineering skills that we’ve learned to improve our community,” Johnston said. “It’s a duel objective to our team that we have every year to focus on the engineering and community.”
Liam Anthony, a Lenape junior and member of the team’s business and marketing group, also praised the team’s hard work this year and the robotics program in general for giving students an opportunity to take what they’re learning in school and use it to better the world around them.
“It’s so amazing that so many students have the opportunity to take what they’re learning in their physics classes and their math classes and apply it to something real and compete against other high schools,” Anthony said.
With the world competition just days ahead of the students, team members, coaches and mentors met at Lenape to pack and prepare their chance to compete against nearly 450 qualifying teams from around the world.
Looking ahead to the upcoming competition, Brantley Cesanek, a team mentor and Latin teacher at Cherokee, told students the team needed to work on making its presence known to other teams in Detroit.
“Part of what we need to do while we’re at Worlds is really put forth the name Storm and make sure that everyone who you meet knows that you’re from Storm and doesn’t forget about you … we gotta get our name out there and we got to get the stuff we do out there,” Cesanek said.
