Shelton Robotics wins with gracious professionalism

The Shelton Robotics team has won the last two league matches in the FIRST FTC Robotics Competition.

FIRST is an acronym for "For Inspiration, Recognition, Science and Technology" and it originated from New Hampshire, created by Dean Kamen and Professor Woodie Flowers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They decided to make robotics competitive, and the FIRST Robotics competition was born.

Eric Stokely is the coach of the robotics team for Shelton High School, and he will gladly talk to you about robots.

"I am the worst person to sit next to on a plane. I'll guarantee you there are dozens of people out there that are going, 'Oh my god, he would not shut up about robots,'" Stokely said. "I can go on forever about FIRST."

Stokely is also a math teacher at Shelton. The Shelton team won its first two FIRST Tech Challenges, or FTC, for grades 7 to 12, which involves smaller robots. The high school competition is the FIRST robotics competition, or FRC.

The FTC is different every year, and this year's challenge is Freight Frenzy. It consists of four teams composed of no more than two operators, a coach and a robot, and the robot cannot be larger than an 18-inch sizing tool that is used.

The four teams will be split into two separate alliances, meaning the Shelton team will be paired with a team from another high school for each match. A match is played on a 12-foot square foam floor with a foot-high glass wall barrier. The two teams will try and move cargo, which are foam blocks, whiffle balls and rubber ducks, to a taped off area called a storage unit and a three-level shelf known as a shipping hub, to score points.

Each match begins with a 30-second autonomous period, meaning the robots will score points on pre-programmed instructions or sensor inputs, and points are tallied once the time ends. After this, there is a two-minute driver control period, where the teams then control their robots and move freight into storage units or shipping hubs, scoring various points.

Stokely said the Shelton robotics team had a gameplan going into its FTC match, and the team won its first league event on the season Nov. 13.

"Somewhere around the third or forth round, they play six rounds total, it's like, we're up in first and they're like, look, we're in first," Stokely said. "And I'm like I've been there before, don't worry, it doesn't last. Then the team below us, sure enough, they pulled ahead, but they were one match ahead of us and then we play our fifth match and we pulled ahead of them and I'm looking at what's happening on the field and sure enough, they're outscoring them. So the win-loss ratio is keeping them at the top."

Shelton had the last match of the day and Stokely said they worked well with their partner and had a plan and were able to come away with first place in the league match.

Stokely is happy to be back in person after last year, with the robotics team forced to meet through Zoom calls.

"We would spend all day in class on Zoom and then we would meet at night and talk about how to play the virtual game," Stokely said. "We built last year's robot online in CAD (Computer Aided Design). We did everything in CAD. ... We built it all up on the screen and then we had a way to play it virtually so we would come in, as a pod, as soon as the school allowed us, and so on that field, by ourselves, we would run our points. We had a pretty good time with it."

Pre-pandemic, the FRC, was at about 4,500 teams throughout the world and the FTC competition had about 6,000 teams.

The season started in September and has been improving its robot for each league match. The interleague championships are Jan. 15. The final state and regional championships wrap up in March and the world championships are in Houston in April.

The FRC competition this year starts Jan. 8 with an event to reveal the game. Stokely said the robots are much bigger and the field of play is basketball court-size. The competition is sorted by districts, and the districts are separated by state, Washington and Oregon, and Alaska is included in this district. There are at least 10 events throughout the two states and Shelton gets to compete in two of them as part of its registration.

Shelton collects points at each event and the top 64 teams go to the district championships at Eastern Washington University in Cheney this year. From there, about 25 teams will go to the world championships in Houston.

The Shelton robotics team last qualified for the world competition in 2017.

Sophomore Richard Beckman is in his third year with the robotics team. He likes working with technology and the community of people.

"It's changed what I see as a career for myself," Beckman said. "I want to build robots for a living."

Beckman, along with Stokely, enjoy the FIRST Community philosophy of Gracious Professionalism. According to the FIRST website, Gracious Professionalism is part of the ethos of FIRST and encourages high quality work, the value of others and respects individuals and the community. It is a part of pursuing a meaningful life.

Stokely found this program when he started teaching in 1998, got a grant and it took off from there.

"After that second or third year, the ethos, that Gracious Professionalism, really started getting to me," Stokely said. "It's like this is so cool. For example, let's say you're a football team and your football team won state every year and then your arch-rival comes to you after the third time you won state and says 'Hey, you guys are doing really well. We're wondering, can we bring our kids over to work with your coach or maybe you could send your coaches over to work with our coaches and make us better?' The laughter would be heard for days. ...Here's robotics, if we feel a team didn't live up to its potential after an event, we're on their doorstep going, 'Hey guys, why don't you come over to our shop, why don't we show you how we do it and give you some pointers on how to get better?' And that's normal. This is part of the ethos."

Stokely said the team learns coding, mechanics and computer-aided design, but ultimately, the program teaches students how to be better citizens.

"Winning is important. Why is winning important? Because it's competition," Stokely said. "But 64 teams are going to go, three will win because it's an alliance of three, but 61 teams are going to go home feeling OK because we consider the events to be a celebration of what we've built. If you win, it's just a little more icing. You get an extra little slice of cake. We're just glad to be there, glad to see the robot run."

Author Bio

Matt Baide, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
Email: [email protected]

• Email: [email protected]