Droid day

Published 6:03 am Sunday, February 2, 2020

Kids from more than 30 schools across Alabama and Tennessee put their tech to the test Saturday, taking over the Wallace State Wellness Center gym floor as teams of budding robotics engineers teed off to see how their robot creations stacked up against the competition.

The college hosted its first-ever event in the nationwide VEX IQ Robotics Challenge, welcoming teams of elementary and middle school students from Huntsville, Fultondale, Selma, Wetumpka, Hartselle, Attalla, Greenville, and South Pittsburg, Tenn., among others. 

Wallace State Computer Science Chair Terry Ayers, who organized the event, said the competition is a fun way to reward kids’ interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) academics — and, hopefully, to keep them invested for the entirety of their early academic lives. 

“The intent is really to keep kids in the STEM mindset all the way through school,” said Ayers. “Inevitably, in late middle school and early high school, a lot of kids start to shy away from science and mathematics, so the intent is to encourage them to continue.”

Each robotics team consists of between two and five students, and each comes to the tournament with a robot assembled from snap-together components manufactured by VEX Robotics. The ‘bots get put through their paces on a large elevated table, referred to as the playing field, manipulating objects on the table in order to score the most points.

Even though Saturday’s tournament is the first ever held at Wallace State, Ayers said he hopes to begin making the contest an annual thing — as well as to stage other robotics events throughout the year. Next weekend, the college will again play host to a VEX competition — only this time, it’ll be high schoolers who’ll be competing.

On both dates, the top game winners and overall excellence winners (so long as they’re from an Alabama-based school) will advance to the state VEX competition at Auburn University, to be held on Feb. 25. Those who continue advancing will earn their way into the VEX Robotics World Championship, held in April in Louisville, Kentucky.