Parker’s high school and middle school robotics teams this year advanced further than ever before in Parker history in their FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and FIRST LEGO League competitions, respectively. The upper school team advanced all the way to Super-Regionals , which took place March 15-17 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa–a competition among nine states including Illinois–while the middle school eighth grade team, Sophisticated AI, will go all the way to Worlds, the final and biggest competition, in Detroit, MI from April 25-28 for the first time in Parker robotics history.

Junior and co-captain of the high school robotics team for the second year running Nathan Satterfield has done robotics since middle school and is very happy with their performance. Satterfield said, “This season I would say has been the most successful season for Parker robotics.” With 19 students in the FTC program, along with another group of high school students who competed in a different event, nearly thirty Parker students competed in robotics in the high school.

The students who competed in FTC were the ones who advanced so far. There were two FTC teams, 3907 RoboTheosis–which has been Parker’s main team since 2009–and 9410 Frank’s Garage, a Parker group that has been in existence for only two seasons. Teams are capped at 15 students, so this year FTC students split into two groups.

The first success for these teams came in the Chicago League Championship on February 10. RoboTheosis got to the semifinals, which they ended up losing, but not before winning the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award, which is described on FTC’s website as an award that “celebrates a Team that thinks outside the box, and has the ingenuity and inventiveness to make their designs come to life. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to design.” Parker’s robots were made out of plastic, with intricate design features that the team members were proud of.

3907 RoboTheosis competed in the semifinals against the Latin School of Chicago’s robotics team, which they won best out of three, 2-0. When they won the finals 2-0 as well, they earned the Inspire Award, for the team that has the best performance and design, and that overall performs the best. They also won the Control Award for exceptional programming of their robot.

The team continued to find success when 3507 RoboTheosis qualified for the Illinois state tournament and won the Rockwell Collins Innovate award at the state level, which is the same award that Frank’s Garage won at the city level. Winning that award qualified them for the North Super-Regionals.  Frank’s Garage did not qualify.

“At Super-Regionals we ended up in ninth place overall in our division of 36,” Satterfield said. “We were picked by the third-seed team to join their alliance in the playoffs. We won our semifinals 2-1, and then in our division finals we lost. Kind of sad about that, but everyone got a medal, and we got a plaque distinguishing the fact that we were our division finalists.” Losing here meant that the team was not able to advance to the Worlds competition.

Not only was this the first time that the Parker robotics team got to Super-Regionals on their own merit for FTC, it was also the first time, according to FIRST Illinois, that a Chicago team qualified past the state tournament.

Cole Rodgers, a junior on the team, attributes their success to great materials and resources. “This year, we got a CNC machine, which basically helps us cut plastic, so we made our robot insanely cool, which got us a few design awards, which helped us qualify,” Rodgers said, referencing Parker’s new Computer Numeric Control machine. “We performed really well on the field and such, but our design is what put us ahead of the pack and helped us qualify for further competitions.”

Satterfield sees other qualities that allowed them to succeed. “I think I can attribute a lot of our success to Aaron Lee, our mentor,” Satterfield said. “He’s really given us a lot of resources and opportunities to excel. I would also contribute it a little bit to the world we’re living in. It’s a very technology-focused world, and as I’ve noticed, slowly but surely, as students are coming up from middle school, they already have a working knowledge of things that really apply to robotics.”

The middle school team has in fact been improving every year. Middle schoolers are split into teams based on grade, each competing separately. Sixth grade team members named the team the Followers of Shmarkey, the seventh grade team is Sinking Ship, and the eighth grade team is Sophisticated AI.

The season kicked off in the fall when the teams participated in FIRST LEGO League (FLL), which is a competitive robotics event under the same FIRST organization that high schoolers compete in. In the Fall, students met to design and build robots, which prepared them for the Qualifying Tournament in the first week of December.

Adam Colestock, grades 4-8 STEM and Coding teacher, and coach of the 7th and 8th grade teams, has seen these students through competition. “In FLL there are three components to the competition,” he said.  “There’s the teamwork component, called Core Values, there’s a design project, and then there’s building and programming LEGO robots.”

The design portion, specifically, sets FLL apart. Middle schoolers have been working on a hydroponics system in addition to their robot. They meet with three judges throughout the competition that evaluate them in each of these three categories to get a combined score.

Both the eighth and seventh grade teams did well enough in the qualifying event that they got to participate in the state tournament on Saturday, January 13. At that event the eighth grade team won the Champion’s Award, which qualified the team for the Worlds festival. This award, which Rodgers calls “so impressive,” is given to the most well-rounded team with great core values, impressive design, and a high-functioning robot.

Colestock, who’s been coaching robotics for seven years, has seen improvement in Parker’s teams. “It helps to have a coach with some experience, and this group of eighth graders, many of whom have been doing robotics for three years since sixth grade, they’ve had some experience,” Colestock said. “And Parker is a pretty remarkable school in the way that it prepares students to feel comfortable communicating and explaining their ideas and being interested in learning new things. They are able to talk to a panel of judges about what they’ve been doing, and talk about the ups and downs of the seasons.”