CMS Robotics Sweeps Spring Showdown Competition | Coronado Island News

Coronado Middle School’s (CMS) four robotics teams recently competed in the 2024 regional Spring Showdown, hosted at Francis Parker School. The teams (Triton Tribe, Robo Tritons, Nado Bots, and Robo Royalty) competed against other San Diego robotics teams where, collectively, they won first place and second place overall, first place in Core Values, first place in Robot Design, first place in the On the Spot challenge, and second place in Robot Game; this was the program’s most successful Spring Showdown performance to date.

One of the program’s lead coaches, Roberta Lenert, noted that the kids were hard at work practicing and making final adjustments the Saturday before the Spring Showdown for almost eight hours.

“It’s the Southern California Spring Showdown, and all of the teams from Southern California can enter. They create a whole new challenge map and new challenges. They use the challenges from [the first season competition], but they reverse them, so what used to have to be pushed down has to be pulled up, what had to be turned to the right is to the left.”

That initial portion of the competition isn’t announced until two months before the Showdown. “They’ll slowly release some teasers, so our kids were practicing on the mats before the official mats even came out. It’s really fun because it gives them another opportunity to be in a challenging competition. Every single team did such a fantastic job and coded so many challenges that in the end, we were tailoring it to cut out challenges because you only have two and half minutes.”

Reed Karosich, a member of the Coronado High School (CHS) Robotics team who helps coach and mentor the middle school teams, explained that the first portion of the competition begins with some baseline points that teams can get for the structure and functionality of their robots. “And that’s great because it if there are more junior teams just starting out, they can get points, too. It also means that you’re rewarded for keeping your designs compact and really sticking to what you need.”

After a practice round, teams then jump into their official runs, with around 15 potential challenges they can accomplish to earn points during this portion of the competition. Each team had to strategize on which of those challenges to prioritize to create a maximized run for their robot. “You have to figure out what you’re most successful at and which challenges you have the most accuracy in.”

“[Our strategy] was based off of points and convenience,” Julia Lee of Robo Tritons commented. “So if we had an attachment and could do one run, but it could also do other stuff at the same time, we’d do that. For example, one run, we were doing the rollercoaster, and we picked up the lifeguard at the same time.”

“The day before competition, our team spent an hour just changing one attachment that wasn’t as accurate and made a whole new one,” Robo Triton teammate Madeline Ruddick added. “We coded the robot to do something completely new, and it paid off because then we could actually aim to get the 90 points. It was a big attachment, so it had to be our last run at the very end, but it could get the most points.”

James Friedman of the Triton Tribe agreed. “We had already pre-built attachments, so we thought, ‘Hey, we could just use this if it’s closer to the ground. We can pull back, push, and just do that. And then when we’re done with it, we’ll go for higher ones.” He mentioned the Light Tower mission where teams had to move a bar up and down with their robot where they then came up with a different attachment strategy.

“With our robot, a lot of our focus was on precision and stability,” Porter Aston of Robo Royalty added of his team’s strategy. “When we were making it, we made sure to build it as symmetrical as possible so that it would be completely balanced. We also did a ton of testing, like with the wheels.” They were able to determine the optimal size wheel and speed at which to code the robot to move in order to maintain a high degree of precision.

Isaac Barker of Triton Tribe mentioned that his team went for an ambitious goal of trying to complete every challenge. Fellow teammate Ian Braham noted further, “The season before this, we did pretty good with our robot, and people said that’s what we kind of thrived on. So we wanted to add on to that and get a little bit better. One of the main things with mission strategy was how to get the maximum points in the minimum amount of time.”

“We almost got there with coding them,” Barker said. “We tried to make our runs precise, and we also tried to avoid switching out attachments because that takes time away from our runs. So we used passive attachments that could do a challenge without needing a motor.”

While the CMS teams practiced and planned for the elements they could ahead of the competition, they still had to be able to make adjustments and recalibrations on the fly to account for even small degrees of changes in the placement of the challenges.

“Once we got to the competition, [about] half of the stuff had to be changed when we got there and tried it,” Barker explained. “We were pretty quick to solve those problems and reprogram the robot.”

“We notice [those differences] on the practice run, and then we recoded [the robot] for those two missions,” Ruddick said of running into those obstacles. “By our first run, we were more prepared.”

Robo Royalty had to account for a missing pin for one of their attachments, sharing a pin from another one between runs. “We also found out the rollercoaster cart had to be all the way back in order for us to hit that lever,” Aston mentioned, “so we had to make it wider, too, so it would actually hit it.”

Lenert was impressed with how each team handled those situations. “Some teams had to adjust their run lineup, their coding, in some cases their placement, and one team extended their attachment. All of that was able to be accomplished, as a team coming up with a plan, in the practice and by their first or second official run.”

The second portion of the competition consists of an On the Spot challenge. Teams are presented with new missions that they won’t have been previously aware of to prepare for, and coaches and mentors are not allowed to discuss with or help the student players in any way.

While the fall semester competition generally has an alliance, this was the first Spring Showdown to include alliances in an hour-and-a-half On the Spot challenge. “With three robots on the board, that’s a bit more chaos added, especially for teams who may not have run multiple robots at once before at all,” Karosich described.

“We were put in our alliances, and then there were multiple missions that we had to accomplish,” Mila Baller explained. “Our team started breaking off into mixes of the different teams based on who wanted to do what. Divide and conquer.”

“You could have all three robots on the board, but only two could be actively running [at one time]. If one comes back into home base, the other one can start running,” Braham further explained of the rules for the allied teams.

As an On the Spot challenge, Ruddick commented that the Robo Tritons began by communicating with their new teammates to figure out what the capabilities of each team’s robot were in regards to the surprise mission challenges and what coding system and tools each teacher was familiar with. “We had a bunch of people who were engineers building missions, and then we had our board that we were coding on,” she said.

“When we were putting it together to make a mission, it was like, ‘Oh, this is how we should put together an attachment or do this attachment,’” Baller added. “And that became, ‘Well, what if we combined it so we can be even more accurate?’”

“It was great to meet the other teams and see what they do,” Braham said of that part of the competition. Aston agreed, adding, “It was really interesting because I’m so used to only working with my teammates, and I got to work with new people and hear what they thought we should do. It was also really cool to see how their robots work, and then work together to make every attachment and make some changes to their robots and our robot.”

Their alliance was able to make use of one of Robo Royalty’s passive (non-motorized) attachments for a mission challenge that required hooking ringed mini-figures and placing them in a particular location. “We thought if we used a mechanism like that and an arm, maybe we could get it done that way,” he explained. “So it was fun figuring out how we could make that arm so that it would be just right that we could put [the figure] down in a way where it wouldn’t stay stuck to the attachment.”

Aston also felt the ability to have two robots active on the boards at the same time was very helpful in achieving more points, as they could perform multiple tasks at once on different sides of the mats. “That was really useful to try to get to as many challenges as possible.”

“We split up in a way that we could be working on three different [challenge] boards at once,” Barker mentioned of the Triton Tribe and their alliance’s strategy. “We divided up the challenges based on how we were going to get them done, and then we met up again after 30 minutes so we could figure out who would be running what and when.”

“With the Light Tower [mission],” he noted as an example, “the Three-Headed Horsemen’s robot had a really long arm, so a lot of our ideas came from if we could shorten that arm to make it more precise and still be just tall enough that when it was straight, vertically, we could just hook on.”

As some of the eighth-grade CMS Robotics members have had multiple years of experience in robotics and at competitions now, this part of the Spring Showdown also offered them an opportunity to help guide newer teams and younger students.

“We had groups with us who were a little bit younger than us, so we guided them a little bit, and they helped us, too, with sharing ideas, but we were able to help lead them with some of their ideas,” Friedman mentioned. “Yeah, they were sixth graders, and, for example, while my group was working on our robot, I went to the other two teams to see what they were doing and could give them advice,” Braham agreed.

“Some of the other teams didn’t know [Gyroscopic Sensors], so we tried to teach them,” Lee mentioned of one of the more technical challenges her team encountered with their alliance teams and how they worked together.

As the competition ended and every team picked up a first or second place in the award categories, the CMS Robotics students were elated to be able to celebrate their hard work and accomplishments together.

“I know our team couldn’t have done it without the other teams so I’m very thankful for them and know they deserve it as much as we do,” Braham commented. The Triton Tribe took first place as Grand Champions overall, in addition to first place in the On the Spot challenge. “Even though we got first, we couldn’t have done it without Nado Bots, or Robo Royalty, or Robo Tridents. We’re very thankful for the other teams, and it makes me so happy to see everybody succeeding in CMS Robotics.”

“Yeah, and it was a really happy moment because all the teams got an award, and we shared all of that success and happiness all around,” Ruddick added. The Robo Tritons were awarded second place in the overall Grand Champions category. She and her team are looking forward to continuing to improve and see how far they can go in the regional competition next year. “And even with the teams that may not have gotten an award, I feel like we were hopefully able to inspire them to keep going forward, too.”

“We can all incorporate new ideas and look ahead to next season,” Aston also noted. Robo Royalty came in first place for Robot Design and second place in Robot Game. Additionally, Nado Bots took first place in the Core Values category of the competition.

Lenert mentioned how proud she was of the work each of the students put into their robots leading up to the competition. “It was our best tournament ever, and these kids are in the lab every single day and on weekends,” she told me. “It is insane how much time and effort they pour into it, along with the parents and our coaches who support them, and it pays off. You can see the difference in teams.”

While the Spring Showdown is the final competition for the current school year, the CMS Robotics team has continued to be busy with their STEAM Days where they help teach fellow middle school and upcoming elementary school students about Robotics, coding, and teamwork. Some CMS Robotics students will also be teaming with some CHS Robotics students for the first time for a new summer competition.

For more information on the CMS Robotics program, please visit https://cms.coronadousd.net/Activities/2024-25-FIRST-LEGO-League-Robotics/index.html.

VOL. 114, NO. 22 – May 29, 2024