Congratulations Coach Pritts and our TROBOTICS/Robotics team for finishing up their regular season on Saturday. Special shout-out to the team of junior Sam Bush and senior Renee Jessee who qualified their robot for the State Championship on March 6!
The state championship format is three 60-second runs of driver control and three 60-second runs of completely autonomous control. The top scores of each category are added together for a total score.
Down to her last autonomous trial, programmer Renee Jessee initialized the robot and it ran the best run of the season, using a pair of vision sensors to “see” objects on the field, pick them up, “see” the goal and score them.
Then, down to his last driver trial, driver Sam Bush executed a superb run scoring 8/9 towers in 60 seconds, best of the day. Their total score topped their previous best.
The duo placed 33rd overall in the state. Congratulations to the team!
The information below was written by Claire Boon, BCHS Student News Editor on March 29, 2021 for the student website:
On the Trobotics team at BCHS, students learn about the inner workings of building and designing a robot. The Trobotics mentor is Mr. Gary Pritts, who teaches Physics and Principles of Engineering who has been the coach for eight years. “I love watching students grow from year to year. I love seeing kids find trobotics that were freshmen and were looking for their place at Chatard,” said Mr. Pritts
“The goal of the troboics team is to always do better than they did before.” said Mr. Pritts. With trobotics people never really get things perfectly right every time so the most important thing is to keep a focused mindset.
This year, a lot of sports and clubs were hindered by all virtual learning in the second quarter for a month and a half. This was no different for the trobotics team. The challenge was cramming in a five month season into just nine weeks. “I am proud of my team for putting in the time. We worked a lot on Saturdays and had a lot of extra practices’ ‘ said Mr. Pritts. A success that was encountered during this season was new developments in the automation and control. This was made by Renee and the robots are capable of sensing where to go based on the color of the robot senses and the robot is able to do tasks like, drop a ball into a basket.
The season was a success throughout all of the struggles. Junior Sam Bush shined through during this season because of the progress he has shown throughout the years of him being on the team. Mr. Pritts said, “Sam Bush did all of the things that you would hope for when you watch someone who has grown in the program since he was a freshman, he got his robot done early, he put in the time to make sure that things were built in an efficient way and then practiced hard.” In competition the competitor gets three tries to score as many points as they can in 60 seconds and on the third try Bush finished the competition in a positive way.