Hope Chapel team crowned champs at robotics competition
Members of the Beach Bots, the Hope Chapel Academy Robotics Team, soak in victory at the FIRST competition in St. Louis. Courtesy photo
When the dust cleared, the points were tallied, and the joysticks stopped moving, the Beach Bots stood as champions.
The Beach Bots, the youth robotics team of the Hope Chapel Academy, recently won the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition held in St. Louis. FIRST, established by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, is an annual robotics competition that regularly draws 30,000 students, featuring teams from all 50 states and 40 countries throughout the world.
Nine high schoolers led the Hope Chapel team to victory. Six of the nine are part of the Academy’s Christian-based homeschool program.
Team Leader Shane Palmerino said that many of the powerhouse programs field far larger teams with 50 to 70 students. The Beach Bots get help from the school’s network of mentors, many of whom have worked in the aerospace industry. But at the end of the day, it comes down to hard work by the students.
“It’s a challenge because everyone has to do everything, but it’s good for the students to get exposed to all aspects,” Palmerino said.
The robotics ministry at the church runs eight months of the year, but things really get going in January, Palmerino said. That’s when FIRST releases specifics about the year’s challenge, and teams get to work assembling their robots.
Previous years have tasked robots with playing games like basketball. This year’s competition, known as FIRST Stronghold, a medieval-style challenge that grouped teams into alliances, where they worked cooperatively to assault and capture opponents’ towers.
The championship is the second for the small program, which also won the title in 2005, back when Palmerino was a team member. The program, he said, has become a way to show kids the exciting possibilities of careers in science and engineering.
Dale Turner, executive pastor at Hope Chapel, sees an additional purpose. Throughout the preparation and competition, the program stresses Christian values and ethics, prizing cooperation and relationship-building over results.
It paid off in St. Louis, Turner said, when in addition to the championship, the Bots got an award for the assistance offered to other teams.
“That, to me, is really the more important award,” Turner said.