Business

State champion robotics team headed to St. Louis

The Henderson County Gorillas practice operating their robot. [PHOTO BY PATRICK SULLIVAN]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 10, 2015

Mike Murphy, the lead mentor for Henderson County’s state champion robotics team, makes it a practice not to coach from the sidelines. In a competition, he stands on the sidelines, silently cheering. It’s easy to be silent when things are going well.

“Second game, we go out there and the kids had a blunder,” he said, describing the state tournament in Raleigh last month. “They didn’t turn their air valve on. It’s pneumatic. It’s run by air. It can’t happen because there’s no air. I’m having a heart attack, and they calmly ran them one at a time.”
It was at that moment— seconds after he watched his team commit what looked like a fatal error — that Murphy realized that the Gorillas had grown up. “Why did we win?” he says. “Sheer magic.”
“Instead of flipping out, they pulled it together and did one tote at a time,” he said, meaning they improvised a strategy that worked despite the lower power of their machine. “They overcame that problem to keep it together. We won.”

Mike MurphyThe victory under fire gave the Henderson County Gorillas the state championship and a chance to compete at the FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in St. Louis April 22-25. Over the three-day tournament, the Gorillas played 18 rounds, working with other teams to have their robots stack plastic containers on scoring platforms, top the stacks with recycling containers and dispose of foam noodles that represented litter.
The Gorillas finished with the highest number of totes stacked, the most recycling bins placed and the highest offensive power rating. The team also earned the “Excellence in Engineering Award” sponsored by Delphi.

Next task: Raise money

Winning triggered an assignment almost as daunting as building a robot that would stack plastic containers and move them onto a platform and spit out the waste. The Gorillas had to raise money. The spirit of engineering gave way to the spirit of St. Louis.
Two weeks ago, Murphy estimated the cost of hiring a bus, lodging and feeding the 18 team members at $17,000 to $20,000. About as many adults — mentors, parents and grandparents — are also expected to travel but will pay their own way.
“The school system is sponsoring our bus,” Murphy said. Now that the bus is reserved, “there’s no turning back.”
The team has enough pledges to make the trip but it still could use more donations for meals and other expenses. (To donate visit www.team1225.com.)
Malika KahnA design engineer with Borg Warner, Murphy says robotics requires students to draw on numerous skills.
“I think it’s an avenue for kids to put in action the things they’re learning at school — physics, mathematics, STEM-related activities,” he said referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “It’s team building. They’re over there right now writing a document to market themselves to send out to folks to help us in funding. We work on all different aspects of things. Anything a business would do we do here, on a small scale.”
The robotics team has members from every high school except for Balfour Education Center. Team members who wear different colors at a Friday night football game wear the same colors when they’re figuring out how to make a fast and efficient manufacturing function.
Olivia Brock“It makes me be more involved with other types of people in the other schools,” said Malika Kahn, a senior at North Henderson. “Before this I would never talk to people from West and East and stuff and now they’re my friends.”
Like Kahn, Olivia Brock, a 19-year-old senior at Henderson County Early College, is on her way to UNC Charlotte to study engineering.
“It opens up a lot of opportunities,” Brock said. “We get scholarships that nobody else has a chance to get simply because we’re on the robotics team.”