Carla Clark | For The Republic Aarya Kulkarni, at left, Vidita Keskar and Deetya Chintam, Central Circuit Breakers team members, work on their robot at Central Middle School, Columbus, Ind., Friday, February 16, 2024.
Local robotics teams are flourishing with several planning a run for a state championship.
It’s the robotics program at Central Middle School’s inaugural year and two of their teams, the Central Circuit Breakers and the ChargerBots, have qualified for the Indiana Robotics State Championship for Vex Robotics teams on March 23 at Lucas Oil Stadium. The Circuit Breakers alone have qualified five times over for state.
TechPoint Foundation for Youth hosts the annual event where more than 300 teams from elementary, middle and high schools from across the state compete. If teams do exceedingly well there, they may earn berths to the VEX World Championship held in Dallas from late April to early May. Last year, 167 Indiana teams qualified for the world championship, more than any other state.
The Circuit Breakers first qualified for state after earning the Teamwork Champion Award at the Full Volume BCSC Pump Up the Volume VIQRC Blended League held in Columbus which took place over the course of five events from October to December.
The team qualified two more times after they collected two Excellence Awards, an honor given to the top overall team, at the Franklin Township VIQRC Full Volume Blended Snow Days Tournament on Jan. 27 and at the “We Heart Robotics” Valentines VIQRC Blended Qualifier tournament on Feb. 10. This past weekend, the Circuit Breakers added another Excellence Award and Teamwork Champion Award at Musketeer Robotics VIQRC Full Volume ES/MS Tournament in New Pekin.
Central Middle School is home to three robotics teams — the Circuit Breakers, the ChargerBots and the CyberBots. They meet for practice two or three times a week, where they build robots, devise strategies and learn from each other.
The Circuit Breaker’s Hannah Weidner, a seventh-grader, was on the Smith Elementary Sonic Cyborgs team last year that qualified for the state and world championship, also in their first year at the time. She brings that experience to her new team and has already been impressed with the focus her squad has.
“We’ve been working a lot more that we did last year, we’ve been working more on weekends,” Weidner said. “I feel like this team has more interest than what we had at the beginning of the year last year.”
Every year, VEX IQ has a different competition game teams play and this year’s is called “Full Volume.” Players score points by moving blocks of different sizes in goals and parking their robots in the “supply zone.”
“Two robots compete in the Teamwork Challenge as an alliance in 60 second long teamwork matches,” the rules state. “Teams also compete in the Robot Skills Challenge where one robot takes the field to score as many points as possible. These matches consist of Driving Skills Matches, which will be entirely driver controlled, and Autonomous Coding Skills Matches, which will be autonomous with limited human interaction.”
“It’s kind of like building Legos but there’s more motors,” said Kai Staggs, a seventh-grader.
Coach Kyle Weidner, who is also Hannah’s dad, didn’t have any experience with robotics until his daughter got involved.
“We actually all showed up at the first game, we thought we were going to be playing BattleBots,” Weidner said.
He said during events the judges will not speak to the adults, requiring the kids to communicate with them. Weidner has already seen a transformation in his daughter as she settled into a leadership role on the team. It’s something that Event Partner and Smith Elementary Sonic Cyborgs’ coach Lisa Haines has noticed for many students involved in BCSC robotics.
“A lot of times you will see kids that are, you know, very shy and not comfortable talking to other people,” said Haines, who likens her role to something akin to an athletic director. “But they get involved with this and they start building up their confidence with the robotics, and if you ask them something about that robot they have spent countless hours on, they will talk your ears off.”
The students often have roles they prefer, but they end up trying a bit of everything whether that’s coding, driving or building.
Seventh-grader Vidita Keskar is partial to building the robots and recognizes all her teammates have their own strengths.
“There are so many different people that have different interests here, so that we can learn from everyone.”
The team is full of self-motivated students that in many instances taught themselves the skills they use during competition.
Staggs, who competes for the ChargerBots, has an affinity for coding and recently taught himself through YouTube videos and online forums.
“I started learning how to code like a year ago, in the summer of 2023. But I’ve been interested in coding for like, years. But I didn’t start learning how to code (until) the summer of 2023. I started learning how to do Python and C++,” Staggs said.
During practice, the ChargerBots were in the midst of building two different robots to decide which they were more inclined towards. They constantly tinker for the smallest advantage.
“We had two different ideas. We had one idea of improving that robot that we were using before, and then we had another idea of building a new robot that could possibly work better. So we decided to just do both,” Staggs explained.
Friendly competition within a team can help bring the best ideas to the forefront, the students said, even if there’s some slight disagreement in practice.
Keskar and another seventh-grader, Bhavesh Sathish Kumar, were each building their own robot and weren’t quite yet in agreement about which one was more suitable.
“So what he’s building is a temporary robot, and what I’m building is what we’re going to use in competition,” Keskar said.
Kumar was quick to add a couple resolute usages of the word “depending” in defense of his creation.
The students make sure to give their robot’s names— one is “Subway” another is “Spatula.” The Circuit Breakers were driving one aptly named “Trip.”
Vansh Saraswat, eighth-grade, has coded for five years now, and like Staggs, taught himself. He hopes to use what he’s learned in a career in engineering or programming.
Eighth-grader Hoshika Choudhari has been involved in robotics since the first grade and enjoys driving. She recently had experience doing so during the finals of a competition.
“It was the scariest moment,” Choudhari said. “But (it) was great.”
Choudhari said getting involved in the program has helped her forge bonds she may not have had otherwise. A couple teammates were already in her swimming class but she didn’t get to know them until she got started in Central’s robotics program.
“I love my team, it’s such a great team,” she said.
Weidner said points are harder to come by this year than last year when teams played a game called “Slapshot.”
“Last year, you could easily get 100 points,” Weidner said. But this year, “most teams — you’re averaging around 70 points.”
Aside from the change in games, she said the step-up in competition at the middle school level has been apparent. But at the end of the day, Weidner is confident in the group. “I think we did get lucky with the kids this year.”
The robotics league was helped in part by a $16,000 grant from Cummins to purchase Vex robotics equipment for the elementary and middle school teams, which went a long way towards helping organize the blended league that took place in the fall and a state qualifier tournament held at Central on Jan. 13, Haines said. The league was also bolstered by TechPoint Foundation for Youth, which provides every school that wants to have a robotics team with one robot, one game board and one field set.
“That combined with Cummins is the reason we were able to have 27 teams at BCSC because we have schools that needed more than one team,” Haines said.
The growth of BCSC robotics has been exponential. There were only three teams at the start of last year and the way students have taken to the program shows it’s likely to see more growth.
“I know that once kids are exposed to it, they get really excited,” Haines said. “And I know once parents see the skills that come out of this, when the kids are working with their robots and working in their teams — all those skills that students are picking up, it makes parents want that for their children also.”
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