TALLAHASSEE (WTXL) - In this week's in depth Tsaparis Tscience, Max has some fun with the robotics club at SAIL High School.
Meet "Pick It Dot Up," it picks things up! The Octopirates club members worked round-the-clock last year to build this functioning robot. And the hard work paid off. The team took home the silver medal in the international "First Robotics Competition." The Octopirates hope to take home first prize during next spring's international competition.
Jasun Burdick, the Octopirates Director, explains, "You’re allowed to hit them as hard as you want with your robot you just can't take a chainsaw and cut them to pieces. So it's very high intense, rounds are two minutes long and so the robots are battling and their smoking on fire. It's very, very, very exciting." Science teacher, Jasun Burdick, formed the club at SAIL High School five years ago and says last year's second place was the best they'd ever done. "It was so close. It was so exciting. The kids were just jumping up and screaming we thought we won and the final results came through and our hearts were crushed, we were crying holding each others arms and it was a fantastic moment."
Before the Octopirates get to the international competition, students meet every Wednesday after school to research, design, code and ultimately construct a functioning robot. Students say the hard work ultimately pays off. Kylan Simmons, a Octopirates participant, says, "This is amazing, the satisfaction of I made this I made it work and through all late hours." Each year the objective of the robotics competition changes. Last year, whoever stacked the most bins won it all.
Jasun says seeing the outcome is the best part of his job. "There's no better way I feel then a kid comes back several years later and says this robot club set me on a great path, this gave me so many opportunities and I got to school I already knew that stuff that they were teaching in my freshman engineering class."
