Park City High School sent five teams to the 24-team Utah State Championship March 1. Each was vying for two coveted tickets to the World Championships in Houston, or one of three spots at a FIRST Tech Challenge Premier Event in Massachusetts.
The club’s all-girls rookie team — named Minerva for the Roman goddess of the arts, wisdom and war — reached the semifinals, securing a spot at the Premier Event.
The four-member team includes sophomores Izzy Vogel and Naomi O’Connor and eighth graders Ivy Owens and Joann Mouton. Vogel is the team’s captain and recruited the other three after her team members from last year moved on.
Vogel said the competitions begin with a robot inspection and judging, where each team presents its robot and judges ask questions. Then qualification matches begin.
Each team forms an alliance with another random team during qualification matches. The alliance team match-ups are selected at random, and Vogel said your partner in one round could be your opponent the next.
“You really have to learn how to collaborate with other teams. Some matches seem unfair and some seem like easy wins,” she said.
Each match has two competing alliances, red and blue, and four robots. The robots are placed at each corner of a square playing field. The objective is to earn the most points by hanging blocks on a bar in the center of the playing area or putting blocks into buckets at each corner. Each corner has one bucket closer to the ground and one a couple of feet off the ground where double points can be earned.
The two-and-a-half-minute match starts with an autonomous period where robots perform a preprogrammed set of actions. Vogel said Minerva focused on creating a robot that could put blocks in the buckets and during the autonomous period it could put two blocks in the highest bucket, which is 43 inches off the ground. That’s thanks to the drawer slides they attached to their robot’s arm.
Minerva’s robot has a shoebox-sized body and features two arms; one to reach the highest bucket and one to hang blocks. The team also put four motors and special wheels that allow the robot to move side to side, forward and backward.
After the autonomous period, teams control the robot remotely. In the last 30 seconds of the match, hanging blocks gives teams an extra 15 points.
Owens said there’s time to strategize and fix robots in between matches. She said she’s had to recode their robot multiple times during breaks.
“It's usually chaotic, but it's really fun and even when you lose against a team, there's never really any bad feelings,” Owens said.
Vogel said the arm that picks up blocks fell off their robot at the state competition; a screw for it was missing. But four other teams arrived with toolboxes offering to help fix it.
“It was really nice, all the teams really wanted to help us, even though we were going to be against them,” Vogel said.
After qualification matches, the top six teams become captions and choose an alliance partner for the playoff elimination round.
Minerva was ranked fifth going into the playoffs and Vogel said they had a specific team in mind to partner up with.
“We picked an alliance partner who focused on hanging the blocks,” she said. "We could put them in the bucket while they hung them, so we weren't really in each other's way."
Their alliance took second place in the state competition, earning Minerva a third-place ranking overall and a ticket to a national tournament.
But the competition isn’t just about engineering a great robot, it’s also about marketing your team and making friends. With three brand-new members and only Vogel who had only competed the year before, the rookie team wanted to stand out. That’s why they wore purple shirts and sparkly purple pants to competitions.
Vogel said they wanted their robot to stand out too.
“We put owl washi tape all over it, 'cause our team's Minerva, which is the Roman [version of the Greek] goddess Athena and her animal’s an owl. And then we put pink duct tape on it to make it pretty and fun,” she said. “Actually, every robot that's competed from Park City this year has a little bit of our pink tape on it.”
Many teams have a whole class build the robot or have veterans of five or more years. But Park City robotics club members have small teams who make time after school for their creations.
Mouton said the team has left its rookie status behind; they’re starting to be recognized as Minerva. She said it’s also not common to have an all-girls team.
“If a girl is on the team, usually they do outreach or, you know, they advertise for teams and stuff like that,” She said. “But I think it's actually really, really cool that with us all being girls, being able to, like, do this and show what women are really capable of.”
The girls are now fundraising using a GoFundMe so they can attend the out-of-state premier event on April 4 and 5. Registration costs $2,500 and the team needs funds for travel, lodging, meals and hardware repairs.
Vogel said they want to encourage other students to join the club.
“We really just want to create opportunities for more younger kids to get involved at some point too,” she said. “We love this so much and we want to share our love for it.”
