Girl Power Drives Hill-Murray’s Robotics Team to the State Tournament
Now more than ever, women are needed in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers and Hill-Murray is producing them. This weekend, the school will send an all-girl robotics team to the Minnesota First Tech Challenge (FTC) State Championship. ThePioNerds Green team, made up of five 8th through 11th grade girls, will put months of hard work and collaboration to the test against 47 other teams.
To qualify for the tournament, the team was judged on their robot’s performance on the playing field, as well as a very detailed engineering notebook and portfolio that laid out numerous items including their various strategies, outreach initiatives, an overview of the robot’s design, build and coding process, plus details of each members role and accomplishments throughout the season. During the state tournament, their robot must perform very specific tasks within a set amount of time.
“This year, the game involves picking up 3-inch blocks, 4-inch whiffle balls, and rubber duckies and placing them on targets,” says coach Ben Gapinski, who has seen the program grow substantially over the past decade. “I started the team with 13 brave students. Our first robot was made mostly of wood as it was durable and inexpensive.”
This year, 35 students in grades 6-12 took part in the program and are building robots using things like 3D laser printed parts, drive trains and programming them with several coding tools. The program has seen a lot of success as well. In 2017, they won a regional tournament and went to the World Championships in St. Louis. They’ve gone to state three of the past four years, and this year alone, won the Connect Award, the Promote Award, the Control Award and the Compass Award. But the success is only a small part of what drew eighth grader Anna Maher to the program.
“It’s less about winning and how good your robot is and more about the experiences you get to have and the people you meet,” she says. “I learned how to work on a team, share my ideas, and accommodate others, along with knowing how the engineering design process works and how to build machines. I have learned that everyone in a group has something to add and listening to what they have to say is very important.”
11th grade teammate Olivia Munro agrees.
“The most practical skill that I have learned in robotics is how to solve problems,” she says. “When something goes wrong on the robot, especially with code, the first step is to figure out exactly what isn’t working. I use the ability to isolate problems every day in school and real life.”
The girls, along with Coach Gapinski, say robotics is for everyone regardless of your skill level and outside interests. The five girls competing this weekend alone are involved in number of other activities including martial arts, tennis, swimming, theatre, rocketry, softball, track, DECA and mock trial. Coach Gapinski says the life skills students gain are immeasurable.
“Every day the students are generating ideas, determining the feasibility of the solutions, gathering requisite knowledge to employ their solution, breaking their process down into a timeline and goals, troubleshooting when the plan goes awry, collaborating with their teammates, recognizing and utilizing the strengths of themselves and others, and having fun,” he says. “I can’t predict what kinds of problems these students will face in the future, but I am very optimistic that they will know how to approach them.”
If you are interested in watching the team in action this weekend, the tournament will be held Saturday, February 12 from 8am-5:30pm at Washington Technology Magnet School in St. Paul. It will also be live streamed
