The Jonesville High School robotics team qualified for the FIRST in Michigan robotics state competition in Grand Rapids after finishing the regular season ranked 68 of 411 teams. The “Cobrots” will compete against 101 of the state’s top teams this week, April 13-16.
The top 76 teams from the state competition will then move onto the world round in St. Louis April 27-30.
“We’re very proud of what the kids have been able to do and very pleased with their progression — they’re a new team and competing against bigger teams with more kids,” said Jonesville High School Principal, Dustin Scharer.
Parent Phil McDowell started the robotics team during his son Randal’s sophomore year because his son wasn’t interested in any of the other extracurricular activities the school offered.
“I didn’t have anything to do after school until I saw FRC, and I decided I wanted to do something with robots, so my father and I got the robotics team set up,” Randal McDowell said.
Phil McDowell worked with Chris Voisin, science teacher and team adviser of the North Adam’s FRC team to get Jonesville’s team started.
FRC is a world-wide competition that seeks to get students to get involved with math and science through competitions that challenge students to design, build, and pilot robots through different tasks. Teams have six weeks to build a robot to complete the tasks for that year. After the six “build weeks” have been completed, teams compete in two regional competitions over the next six weeks, with the potential to then qualify for the state and world competitions.
With the help of Phil McDowell and a second team advisor, Jared Page, the eight members of the robotics team designed and built a remoted controlled robot and then wrote the computer code to operate it.
This season, robots were tasked with driving over obstacles, shooting exercise balls through goals, and pulling themselves upwards on a bar several feet above the ground.
The robotics team began to succeed at the second regional competition of the season, coming in first along with their competition “alliance,” defeated 37 other teams, including four from Hillsdale County.
Phil McDowell hopes this year’s team can even compete beyond Michigan’s state competition.
“They’ve already exceeded my expectations, so I think anything they do from here on out is just wonderful,” McDowell said. “But I think the team has a realistic chance of going to the next stage which is the world round in St. Louis.”
As a result of the success of the robotics team, Jonesville has added a Lego robotics course to its regular course schedule, to encourage students to continue exploring robotics and similar technologies in addition to the STEM courses the high school already offers.
