Woodridge Goes to NSBE Robotics Competition

APRIL 10, 2017: On Thursday, March 30, 2017, Woodridge’s Robotics team traveled to Missouri for the NSBE presentations. NSBE stands for The National Society of Black Engineers. NSBE in Kansas City, Missouri allowed students to present on a topic they had worked on to compete. Along with the support of our coach Robin Wilford, we were able to board a plane for the first time and show off our work.  For this project, we also created a PSA that was posted on Youtube. Look us up “FPCS Animal Trafficking” if you want to check it out.  

Diamond Thompson, Nina Pierre, and Nassir Durham participated in the robotics competition. For the competition, we had three trials: project presentation, core values, and robot design.

During The first trial known as the “project presentation”,  we gave a presentation about how animals and humans interact. The topic we chose was animal trafficking. We researched it and made a board about that topic. We had to be aware that there were many other topics that may be better than ours, so we perfected our board in every way possible.

The second trial is known as “core values” was based on our cooperation as a team. To get a good score we had to talk about how we worked together during the project and what we think we could’ve done better. We also had to carry a board with the tip of our fingers and bring it to another area in the room to see how well we could cooperate.

In the third trial, we had  “robot design”. In this trial, we had to show our robot to the judge and tell about how we built the robot. Robot design is very important because one slip-up can mess up the entire program and take points away from the overall score. For example, if a piece is missing from the robot, the robot design could easily fall apart in an instant.

This was a very exciting experience in Kansas City, Missouri but we will not get our results until next week. I hope after reading this article more people will join robotics.

Nassir Durham is a 6th grade scholar at Friendship Woodridge Academy.