Coronado robotics team impresses

ON TO ATLANTA
Companies or individuals interested in sponsoring the team's journey to national competition in Atlanta can contact adviser Bryce McLean at mcleabb@d11.org.

Visit the team's award-winning Web site at www.team2996.com/index.html

It was the rookie team that thought it could.

And it did.

The Cougars Gone Wired robotics team from Coronado High School won the Rookie All-Star award, the Web site award and the Autodesk animation award at the recent Colorado FIRST Robotics Regional Competition in Denver.

Its powerfully defensive robot kept other robots from scoring in a competition game and impressed other teams so much that when it came time for the top eight teams to choose two partners for the championship round, one of the powerhouses chose Coronado Robotic 2996 for its alliance.

And the alliance won the championship.

The upshot is that the Coronado team gets to go to the national championship April 16-18 in Atlanta - but has less than two weeks to raise the estimated $10,000 it would take to pay the entrance fee and get about 30 students there.

"We're competing against teams that are a line-item of $50,000 in some corporate budgets," said staff adviser Bryce McLean, a math and engineering teacher at Coronado. "But we've had some great community support and we covered the $12,000 to get to regionals."

The team got a jump-start NASA grant for $6,000 to cover the regional competition entrance fee. As the team geared up last fall, other local companies contributed cash, supplies and help with metal fabrication.

McLean was heartened last week when Lockheed-Martin stepped in to pay the $5,000 entrance fee for the national competition, but the team continues to seek sponsors for the trip.

The 30-plus team members have kicked in enormous amounts of time, energy, ingenuity and enthusiasm to make it happen.

The task, delivered to all teams on Jan. 3, was to build a robot that could function in one-sixth gravity and play a game designed by the organization that sponsors the competition. For the next six weeks the team spent four hours every day after school and eight hours on Saturdays working on its robot to have it ready to ship to Denver by the Feb. 17 deadline.

"We designed it to be simple, to do one task really well," said Charlie Howard, a junior and part of the design and manufacturing team. "It plays defense really well. We were able to pin the other robots and keep them from scoring."

Beyond that, Junior Garrett Seeman, says there's another reason why one of the top teams, Team 399, chose the Cougars to join the alliance for the finals.

"We were a little different," he said. All of the teams have scouts who watch other teams during the competition to find potential partners that would have complementary skills.

Several students said they believe everyone plans to return next year - including the half-dozen seniors who have vowed to mentor next year's team.

"It's been a phenomenal experience," said senior Matt Butcher, who was vice president of the build team. He credited McLean for keeping the team going until it found a few corporate sponsors and the Academy School District 20 robotics team, Rocky Mountain Robotics, that mentored the rookies and became "great friends."

Most of the team members are considering engineering careers, although some of the younger students, such as freshman Leah Jaron, are undecided.

She said she joined the team because her brother, Peter, was talking about it and because she'd known co-advisor Gary Hilty when he taught at Irving Middle School.

"It sounded pretty cool and I like to be a busy person," she said, adding that she hasn't decided on a future career direction. "It gave me a look at real life situations."

As part of the Web team, she went onto the site shortly before the competition and rechecked every link and page and found a few glitches the team was able to fix. For next year, she's thinking about being part of the "pit" crew that fixes what's not working during the competition so she can get more mechanical experience.

In the meantime, though, Jaron and her teammates are focused on the Atlanta competition.

"We're counting down the days," Jaron said.

Call the writer at 636-0251.