Peddie Robotics’ Success Leads to Reflection and Anticipation

Vivian Sun’18, Staff Writer

            The success of the Peddie Robotics Team at two district events and the Mid-Atlantic Regional (MAR) District Championships led at the team to advance to World Championships in St. Louis, Missouri.

During the winter term, students partook in Robotics as an after-school activity and were in either the engineering or programming portions of the team, with some participating in both sub-teams. The students met after school in the Digital Fabrication Lab and worked six days and 18 hours a week.

Scott Meredith, teacher, mentor and coach of the robotics team, expressed that students on the FRC team have exceeded his expectations.

“We had to get everyone up to speed – it was tough since everybody was new. Nobody had seen the competition before, nobody had built a robot before. The kids kept working, kept reiterating throughout the post-build season and the competition season to improve the robot and work out the kinks to get to the core value of the program, which is to iterate and find a simple solution to a complex problem,” Meredith said.

Students also enjoyed the building experience.

“The build process was a large exercise in balancing what we wanted to accomplish and what was unnecessary for the robot to have in the game,” said Matthew Choy ’17, a member of the engineering build team. “During prototyping, we focused a lot on our intake strategy and the mechanics of our shooter. How we decided what would go on the robot boiled down to the weight constraints and the overall impact on the weight distribution, center of gravity, size of the robot, et cetera.”

“Looking at the robot as a whole throughout the competition, I feel that all the effort I put in was paying off – winter term was almost tedious, but I think it was worth it,” said Soo Jung Jang ’16, a member of the programming team. “There was a lot of trial and error. We had to move on to overcome these issues, work on the little things, get it done step by step.”

The robotics team competed at two district events in Bridgewater and Montgomery, New Jersey, ranking ninth at Bridgewater and winning the Montgomery event; the students won five awards, among them the Rookie All-Star Award, the Highest Rookie Seed Award at both district events, the Industrial Design Award and the District Event Winner Award. The team also competed at MAR District Championships at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from April 13 to April 16 and finished fifth out of 60 teams, winning the Highest Rookie Seed Award.

“I think all our hard work really paid off; we were doing very well in our FRC season and I look forward to continuing to World Championships,” Choy said,

“I am spectacularly proud of the team and their effort this year; it was about the best first season we could hope for,” said Meredith.

The team will be competing at World Championships in St. Louis, Missouri from April 27 to April 30.