ST. LOUIS • About 29,000 students and 800 robots descended on downtown Wednesday in preparation for the FIRST Championship, the most prestigious robotics competition in the world.
Wearing matching T-shirts and elaborate costumes, they filled the Dome at America’s Center and Union Station representing 40 countries and all 50 states. On Thursday, they will begin an international competition in matches designed to celebrate science like Americans celebrate sports — with lots of noise, fanfare and enthusiasm.
And through Saturday, they will demonstrate what’s possible when you give a group of students a problem to solve and a box of parts, motors, sensors and gears. The result is a robot they have designed, built and programmed to take on various tasks on a court or game table. For the LEGO leagues, children also have to develop a solution — often times inventions — to a real-world problem. This year the theme is solid waste.
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“They’re not soccer players, necessarily, and they’re not usually sports kids, but they still want to compete,” said Jeff Pitts, a retired brewery manager and robotics mentor who is working with a nonprofit group to expand the activity at the middle school level. “They want to compete with their minds and their hands.”
The FIRST championship — short for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — is in its sixth year in St. Louis and is free and open to the public. Through Saturday, hundreds of matches and presentations will involve students from kindergarten to 12th grade.
In its 26th year, FIRST continues to grow nationally, with more schools each year offering robotics as a club or a class, pushing more students to get involved in science, engineering and technology. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, began the competitions in Manchester, N.H., to give science the same appeal as sports.
Particularly at the high school levels, the match-ups can be intense, with robots going head-to-head in timed competitions on a space half the size of a basketball court.
Students work with mentors from companies such as Boeing and Honeywell to design, program and build their remote-controlled robots. The teams receive the kits in January and have six weeks to build their robots, which may weigh up to 150 pounds.
They qualify for this week’s championship by trouncing others at regional and state competitions held throughout the school year.
Robots in highest echelons, the FIRST Robotics Competitions, will work to outmaneuver one another, gaining points by hurling boulders through the window of a tower. In the final seconds they will attempt to scale the opponent’s tower.
At the FIRST Tech Competitions, smaller robots compete in a game modeled after rescue situations faced by mountain explorers all over the globe.
‘Kind of a rush’
WormGears Warriors, a group of eight teenagers in Edwardsville, is among the 16 high school-level robotics clubs competing from Illinois. Eagle Storm, the robotics team from North Tech High School in Florissant, is among 18 high school-level teams competing from Missouri.
“It’s really spectacular and kind of a rush,” said Thomas Mills, a senior at North Tech, as he and his team prepared for their first world competition.
The event has doubled in size in the six years it’s been held in St. Louis, outgrowing its original space at the Dome and the America’s Center. This year, half of the events will be held at Union Station.
Next year, the event will be a dual championship held in St. Louis and Houston. In 2018, it will be in Houston and Detroit.
On Wednesday, thousands of students and adults filled parts of Union Station as they set up their robots and stations, also known as “pits.” Some were dressed in sailor uniforms, in white lab coats or in Star Wars costumes. Some had spray-colored their hair, and some wore tutus.
In the Dome, thousands more spent the afternoon getting ready for the matches.
This year, the number of FIRST teams in Missouri grew to 862 involving about 8,000 students in all grades, according to the organization. In Illinois, there are about 900 teams that involve about 8,100 students.
‘Grow the fire’
Increasingly, middle and elementary schools are offering the club as an after-school activity as an attempt to engage children at an earlier age.
Organizations such as Girl Scouts are sponsoring teams to get more girls involved. Earlier this month, a Girl Scout team from Sperreng Middle School in Lindbergh visited the White House to demonstrate their science fair invention that turns Styrofoam cups into glue. A patent is pending.
Even with the growth, the void remains great, particularly in schools with high concentrations of minority or low-income students.
“In the vast majority of schools, kids still don’t have access to these programs,” said Donald Bossi, president of FIRST.
It’s a problem for companies that see robotics as a pipeline to employees and are demanding a more diversified work force. On Wednesday and Thursday, Monsanto planned to host 115 robotics participants at its global research center in Chesterfield to show them potential career opportunities.
In engineering and technology fields there continue to be more jobs than qualified people to fill them. Those who have the skills are overwhelmingly white or Asian men, Bossi said.
“We’ve become more vocal advocates of using robotics to help engage more women, more kids of color, more kids from less advantaged economic circumstances,” he said.
In St. Louis, the Clavius Project is working to put robotics into all middle schools in the city and underserved parts of St. Louis County. It’s a partnership that began between the team at St. Louis University High School and several Catholic middle schools to provide after-school robotics clubs.
The project operates with the direction of Pitts, the former brewery manager and SLUH parent who works as a robotics volunteer.
“It is amazing to me whether it is public or Catholic or charter, the number of schools at the middle school level who have nothing going on around STEM,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is find the kids who are interested, light the fire, grow the fire.”
The experience can put children on a path to winning college scholarships and high-paying careers in science, technology, engineering and math.
For example, when Luther Banner III was a freshman at Hazelwood Central High School, he was recruited to robotics by a physics teacher, who also served as the robotics coach. Banner had broken his leg in football and was looking for another way to compete.
“I got hooked,” he said.
By his junior year, Banner was co-captain of the robotics team, which competed in the 2011 championships in St. Louis. It was there that Banner met recruiters from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That meeting led to scholarships that gave him a full ride to the school.
In June he plans to graduate from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in computer science.