The new Mayflower High School robotics team barely had enough time or the correct tools to compete, but the team won the Rookie All-Star Award at the regional contest and will go to the world competition in April.
The students cheered, hugged, high-fived and cried when the award was announced at the Arkansas Rock City Regional competition, which took place March 8-11 in Little Rock.
“I am so proud; I am so proud,” teacher Linda Gangluff Riley said as she videoed the moment on her cellphone.
Riley, the gifted-and-talented coordinator for the Mayflower School District, applied for and received a $6,000 grant from the FIRST Robotics Competition to form a team. It is Metal Eagles 6640.
She recruited most of the nine-member team from the school’s Geek Club.
Students registered the day before the competition deadline and had six weeks to build a functioning robot from a kit — frames, metal, all kinds of parts, one battery, a computer and software. The robot had to complete challenges in an obstacle course at the regional event, sponsored by the FIRST Robotics Competition at Barton Coliseum in Little Rock.
Reagan Brincks, 16, said the team worked on the robot after school until 7 p.m. or later many days. She recalled that Riley provided home-cooked meals, made by her husband, Michael, for the students.
Reagan said it was “almost like a family dinner.”
“I think that bond was one of the most crucial parts of our building process because without it, we wouldn’t have been able to come together throughout all the struggles and hardships through the six-week building process,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been able to come as far as we have.”
The team also had an extra push from a fourth-grader.
“Toward the end of our building process, one of the fourth-graders, Shawn Knuckles,
he went up to Mrs. Riley.” Reagan said. “He had $1.50 in his pocket, and he gave it to Mrs. Riley and said, ‘I want our robotics team to do well,’ so this is for him.”
At the regional competition, students put the $1.50 in a clear-plastic page protector and wrote a note about where the money came from. They taped the note to the pole in the center of their “pit,” which also had the team number displayed. “That was our inspiration,” Reagan said. “We’re actually going to talk to him today and say, ‘Your $1.50 sent us to the world championship.’”
The team was sponsored in part by Exxon Mobil, which made a donation, and engineers from Molex in Maumelle mentored the students.
Reagan said each student drew a sketch of a robot, and the Molex mentors “took a little bit from each one to be more efficient.”
As the programmer in the Geek Club, she wanted to help program the robot. However, a Mayflower School District information-technology employee, Aaron Leabres, was also a mentor.
“Because [the program] was completely different from what I had learned, … it had to be programmed through Java Script — I didn’t do most of it. I watched over his shoulder,” Reagan said.
Sophomore Briawna Stigall, 15, is the only non-Geek Club member on the team; she’s in the gifted-and-talented program.
Briawna said she’s always been interested in how things work and used to take apart CD players when she was growing up. “This is the first time I’d built anything from scratch,” she said. “The experience [of competition] was completely overwhelming but amazing at the same time.”
Reagan called the competition “very intense.”
“When we got there, I wasn’t expecting anything we were presented with,” Reagan
said. “There were over 50 teams, and each team had a pit station; there was music blaring. There were people all around. It was an overwhelming feeling. You could tell that everyone there, they wanted to compete, and they knew what they were doing.”
Senior Austin Smith, 17, said all the other teams at the competition had 20 to 30 members — except rookie teams like Mayflower, and those had 15, he said. Mayflower’s team had nine members, including a photographer.
He said although it was a competition, there was a spirit of camaraderie among the teams.
“It was just stressful,” he said. “There were many things we had to fix. [The robot inspectors] looked at our wiring and stuff and said we had to rewire just about our whole robot, but thankfully, a team — I believe 2992 from Mandeville, Louisiana — they actually had one of their guys come over and help us with that. He helped wonders.”
At another point, the spark-motor controllers were “fried,” Austin said, and a team from Mississippi gave the Mayflower students two for free. “We paid them back,” he said.
Briawna said that at times during the competition, “we didn’t have either the correct tools or didn’t have them with us. We needed a mini flathead screwdriver, so we crushed the end of a paperclip with a hammer, and we used that.”
Briawna said they were probably considered the underdogs.
“We’re from a very small school, so we were kind of thrown together,” she said.
Riley said the robots had to complete a “challenging obstacle field” with a certain set of criteria. Mayflower competed in matches on Friday and three quarterfinal elimination matches on Saturday; the team lost two.
“We thought, ‘There goes our chance to go to world,’” Riley said. “We stayed for the awards; the last award was the Rookie All-Star Award. If you receive that award, it’s an automatic bid to go to world.”
The students said they were on pins and needles.
“We were all holding hands, and we were just saying, ‘Please let it be us,’” Reagan said.
Mayflower’s team was announced.
“We were hugging and crying,” Reagan said.
“Our school supported us, but a lot of people, they didn’t think we could do it because we are a small school,” Reagan said. “We went out there, and we showed them what we were made of.”
Riley said it was the highlight of her teaching career.
“We were ecstatic. We worked our tails off,” she said.
The team’s robot is a little battle-worn. Riley said the obstacle courses were “brutal” on the robot, and it has duct tape along one side. The students must wait until they get to Houston to repair the robot, Riley said.
The team’s other challenge is to raise $12,000 to fund the trip to the world competition, which will begin April 19 in Houston, Texas. To donate, people may go to gofundme.com and search for Metal Eagles 6640.
The students are excited and confident.
“We know more of what we’re doing this time,” Briawna said. “Last time, we were thrown into the deep end.”
Reagan said the experience has been life-changing.
“It has definitely swayed what I want to do after high school. Originally, what I wanted to do was go into film production. Now I would like to go more into engineering ,” Reagan said. “It’s been a blast; this whole experience has been wonderful.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.