Fannin County High School’s Engineering program was recently awarded a Girl-Powered robotics grant through Vex Robotics and Robot Events for $1,000.
The grant is to be used to form a robotics team of at least 50% female students to compete in the VEX robotics program.
Senior Lexi McGill and Junior Samantha Rosas are the first two members of the high school’s recently created team and have already started working on their robot design for the VEX Robotics challenge called Tower Takeover.
“It’s really opened my eyes to different types of engineering,” McGill said. “I’ve always been like, ‘I want to do industrial engineering,’ but it’s kind of opened me up to mechanical and robotics engineering and just having it as an option.”
The Tower Takeover challenge is played on a 12x12 square field where two alliances, one red and one blue, are composed of two teams each. The alliances compete in matches consisting of a 15 second Autonomous Period, which is then followed by a one minute and 45 second Driver Controlled Period. The object of the challenge is to attain a higher score than the opposing alliance by placing cubes in towers or scoring cubes in goals.
“I think it will be really fun,” Rosas said. “I play sports, so it will be like a sport pretty much doing this. Especially it will be fun because you’re competing with something you were able to make with someone else, so it’s like the equivalent of a parent watching a kid.”
The all girls team will be competing at Gilmer High School Saturday, January 11 and at the Technology Student Association (TSA) State Conference in Athens, GA in March.
“I am really proud of these two ladies for taking on the challenge of designing and building a VEX robot,” Engineering teacher and TSA Advisor Bubba Gibbs said. “The skills they are learning related to teamwork and engineering design will serve them well in the future.”