With their “Back to the Future” themed robot, named Gigabot 1.21, the Issaquah Robotics Society (Team 1318) placed first overall at the Central Washington Regionals March 22-23 in Ellensburg.
The team also made it to the quarter-finals in the Oregon Regionals March 8-9, ranking 13th out of 59 teams. These kids, future engineers and scientists, also won the Entrepreneurship Award in Ellensburg for their business and marketing plans.
The challenge began Jan. 5 when the “build season” starts. The group has six weeks to design and build the robot. Although the team is made up of Issaquah High School students, this is not a school activity, although the IHS wood shop allows them to use their space. No, these students toiled after hours, with the guidance of private mentors and sponsors. This year they had 10 mentors, one of whom has a PHd in Robotics.
Team 1318 as it is known, is a FIRST (For inspiration and recognition in science and technology) Robotics team, a program founded by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway. Since 1989, the FIRST Robotics teams have grown from 28 teams to 2,700 worldwide — the Issaquah Robotics Society was team number 1,318, hence the name. The team is now in its tenth year.
Each year the game rules are a little different. This year the robots dueled on a 54-foot by 27-foot field in a game called “Ultimate Ascent.” The robots were built to shoot heavier than normal frisbees into goals for points. Four of the team members are the drive-team, who stand behind safety glass, controlling the robot remotely.
In Ellensburg, even though Gigabot 1.21 was the number one robot, Team 1318 was competing with Newport and Snohomish teams against other teams. The Newport robot ended up flipping over, so that knocked Issaquah out of the semi-finals for the competition. The Issaquah Robotics team is made up of 37 students ages 14 through 18. Gunnar Alden, a senior at IHS, had a huge surprise at the Portland games.
“FIRST has $16 million in scholarships that not many people take advantage of,” he said.
Alden applied and received a $6,000 scholarship to Oregon Tech in Klamath Falls, where he will major in manufacturing engineering technology in the fall. His mom, Rebekah Jenkins, a technology consultant, is one of the team’s mentors.
“The mentors are there constantly,” Jenkins said. “And only two of them have kids on the team.”
The mentors and sponsors are critical she said, because the cost to compete in just these two events was $11,000. FIRST gives the teams a kit of parts – 100 pounds of “stuff” one of the students said, but from there they are on their own to build the robot. The teams are not to spend more than $3,500 on the robot, and the Issaquah team kept it down to $1,000.
