Kimball Robotics Teams continue preparation for State Competition following successful practice

KIMBALL -- The Kimball robotics teams are preparing for their State Competition next month following a successful Mini-Play Competition in Alliance Saturday. 

Kimball’s teams each took home one award at the Mini-Play. KPS Kimbots earned the award for Most Creative Idea for their Innovation Project, and Kimbots took home 1st Place for the design of their Innovation Project Model. 

The Turquoise Region Mini-Play is a regional practice competition leading up to the State Competition March 19 – 21 where 99 teams across the state compete at the UNL campus. 

Coach Rhonda Hawthorne said she is confident her team will do well at the State Competition, given Kimbot’s award at the Mini Play and that they recieved Runner-up at State last year. 

“We have some kids this year who have never programed and never done any of this before, and then we have some of our students who have been doing this for a long time,” Hawthorne said. “I think they are doing really well working together and teaching each other as we go along.” 

The season runs from August through March, and in this time the teams work on two projects that center around the theme Unearthed, which is based on geology or archeology. 

They first built an obstacle course made of Legos that consists of various missions that either have a lever or a pully, then they built a robot and wrote codes for them to complete the missions by either pulling the lever or pully. 

Each mission is color coded, and when they swipe a key through the color sensor, it triggers the robot to complete the mission that corresponds with that color. 

The teams have 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete as many missions as possible on the board. Each mission is worth a certain number of points, and the goal is to gain as many points as possible. 

The teams also completed an Innovation Project where they researched common problems that archeologists face, then they innovate to solve the problem. 

One team designed a robot, named Wall-E, that detects arsenic in the ground using X-ray fluorescence. 

“Wall-E can vacuum topsoil, drill into the ground to collect deeper samples and safely store them,” Noah Hinton said. “After collecting soil, it returns to the base so the samples can be removed safely and sent for testing. Instead of people digging by hand, our robot does the dangerous work first. 

The other team designed a robot, named after the Greek God Hephaestus, that can search for artifacts more efficiently while causing less harm to the land being explored. 

“As the model passes over the ground, there are two camera-like sensors which take photos of the earth’s crust, allowing human archeologists to see the findings without walking the area themselves,” Hawthorne said.  

The model also features tongs that pick up the artifacts and safely store them in a box on the side of the robot until a human archeologist can remove it for further evaluation. It also has a row of flaps that cover the back to allow grass, rocks, and other things to pass through without causing them damage. 

Lewis said it takes the kids months to get to this point where their robots are ready for competition, and they are still troubleshooting a few of their missions to ensure they will work at the State Competition.  

“The number of times their robots fall apart, or their ideas don't work, or their mission isn’t coded the right way – [they learn] a lot of perseverance because it takes all the way from August to now to get a finished project,” Lewis said. “It also teaches them teamwork because they have to work as a team, and a lot of times kiddos that are that young don’t always see eye-to-eye, so they have to figure out how to work together as a team.” 

Timothy Hawthorne said he likes being on the team because he loves building and coding robots. 

Katie Hawthorne has been on the Kimbots team for seven years and says that she loves how the themes change each year, so they can build different robots to solve different problems. 

“It’s really cool to get to build a robot and get to go to competitions because that’s not something you do every day,” Katie said. “It’s just a really cool opportunity.”