LONG BEACH, Miss. (WLOX) — Students at Coast Episcopal School are preparing to take their robotics skills to a national stage.
Inside Seamann Makerspace at Coast Episcopal School, sixth grader Isabella Wood types lines of code that tell a robot what to do, step by step.
“It doesn’t matter about, like, the scores and stuff. It matters about how we’re treating each other,” Wood said.
Wood and her teammates, Hutson Lambert, Augustine Martinez, and Porter Bates, make up the Coast Episcopal Robo Raiders. The robotics team is headed to the Western Edge FIRST Robotics Invitational in California, competing against about 90 teams from around the world.
Building and coding missions
The students build, code, and test every robot mission.
“Our mission strategy is to do the easiest and quickest missions with the most points,” Martinez said.
The team has 260 points coded out of 300 needed to make the robot run its missions.
The Robo Raiders say the biggest lesson isn’t engineering; it’s teamwork under pressure. They’ve already overcome equipment failure in the state competition.
“You cannot be stressed or angry because core values are a big part of robotics. You just have to work together to solve the problem,” Lambert said.
Innovation project
The team also created a board game for their innovation project based on this year’s theme, archaeology, called “Relic Rush.”
“The board has four different sections. The ocean, the ice biome, the forest, and the desert. And basically, you use coordinate cards to try to find artifacts. At the end of the game, whoever has the most artifacts wins,” Lambert said.
Coach Tarah Herbert says what stands out most isn’t the robot or board game but how the students handle challenges.
“I’ve seen them grow in so many ways… from public speaking to just the way they handle situations. It’s really amazing to see them grow as people and not just winning,” Herbert said.
The Robo Raiders travel to the competition in California in May.
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