The school day may have been over, but room 105 at Parkside was buzzing with excitement Wednesday as students, donning safety glasses and working with needle-nose pliers, made repairs to their competition robot ahead of this weekend’s FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) in Bedford. It’s the first time a Parkside robotics team has participated in a competition since 2019.
Team 12329, The Knyte Bytes, led by district speech language specialist Stacey Edgar, is made up of 10 students from grades 5 through 8, who designed, built and programmed the ball-shooting robot themselves.
“I am learning alongside these kids,” said Edgar. “As much as I know about robotics and FIRST, I know nothing more than the kids.”
Edgar, who also works with the West PowerKnights team, stepped into the position earlier this year after learning the program was in danger of ending when the previous head left the school. It’s a challenge that’s only strengthened both her and the student’s commitment to the cause.
“I’ve never built a bot. I’ve never programmed. I’ve never programmed in my life!” said Edgar. “I’ve been involved in the high school level for a very long time… But I take care of, like the spirit committee and help out with recruiting and the outreach part of it.”
Members of the Powerknights team are also involved with the Knyte Bytes, donating supplies and volunteering their time to help the young team learn the ropes and inspire them to keep working towards future goals.
“”It’s a good program for a lot of kids to come into,” says sophomore Taylor Goldberg. “If you want to go into an engineering field or anything like that, it can help a lot because it goes into a lot of, like, coding and building and how everything works.”
Members of the team say they look forward to working on their robot after school and using their classroom skills in a real-world setting. “I love building stuff” says eighth grader Grace Foote. “It’s like using math but to build stuff.”
The students will compete against more than 30 other teams at this weekend’s event in an FTC game called “Decode, Presented by RTX.” Teams will divide into random groups of four and play on a 12-foot square playing field and work to collect balls called “artifacts” and shoot them into goals. The robots will work autonomously for the first 30 seconds before players can steer and shoot using remote controls. Students will also take part in an interview session with competition judges to discuss what they’ve learned, how they’ve designed their bots and the reasons behind the designs, helping to strengthen their speaking skills and confidence.
The team will then get to take what they learned at the FTC competition and apply it at a second competition next month. Following the competition season, the students hope to take their bot to local elementary schools to showcase their work and inspire younger students to get involved in the program.
For more information on the FIRST Tech Challenge, click here.