About The champion newspaper. (Decatur, GA) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (April 2, 2015)
Page 14A LOCAL The Champion, Thursday, April 2 - 8, 2015 Fernbank’s robot stacks recycling bins during the competition. Photo provided Robots were designed to stack recycling bins during the comple tion. The Fernbank LINKS robotics team (No. 4468) won a spot in the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship in April. Photo provided From left, members of Team Reboot, made of DeKalb County homeschoolers, and Fernbank LINKS get ready to com pete. Photos by Andrew Cauthen, unless otherwise noted Fernbank robotics team going to world championship by Andrew Cauthen andrew@dekalb champ, com A local robotics team will be competing in a world championship in April. The Fernbank LINKS robotics team is going to the FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Sci ence and Technology) world robot ics championship for the first time in the team’s three-year history. The team was the second- place finalist out of 66 teams in the Peachtree Regional, held March 26- 28 at the Georgia World Congress Center. Fernbank LINKS won the NASA Engineering Inspiration Award and Nicholas Weddington, a LINKS team member and Druid Hills High School junior, was a regional Dean’s List Finalist. “The past four days might have been some of the best and most re warding of my life,” wrote Andrew Morris, the team’s chief technical officer, wrote in a Facebook post. “Fernbank LINKS has made huge strides over the past three years and were finally able to win the Engineering Inspiration award at Peachtree this year! It’s been a crazy run so far and tons of people have helped to make it happen.” “We are beyond excited,” said Debi Huffman, the team’s sponsor. Huffman said the students de signed their robot—which picks up and stacks recycling bins—without the aid of an adult technical mentor. “They worked out the whole thing,” Huffman said. “These kids have come such a long way.” Global Dynamics, a team from Decatur High School, won the com petition’s “Innovation in Control Award.” For the team, Emma Jackson, a freshman at Decatur High, does “cutting and drilling and putting things together.” “I decided to join the team because I’ve always thought robot ics. . .was interesting, and I heard they had a really good program at school,” she said. “I just brought me into the world of robotics.” Emma said her “favorite part about it is seeing what you built on the field and doing all these incred ible things and just saying ‘Hey, I built that.’” Emma is one of five girls on the approximately 30-member team. “[We’re] treated the same way, just like being a guy on the team,” she said about being on the male- dominated team. “[We] still do a lot of things that a guy would do.” Darien Craig, a junior at De catur High School, has been on the team for three years. “I actually [have been] doing hobby robots for quite a while,” Darien said. “We moved to Decatur my freshman year. One of the actual factors in why we moved here was to join this robotics team. “Besides a lot of fun and techni cal experience, FIRST is the greatest thing to put on a college resume because college recruiters know that means you’re able to work on a team and you have technical expertise at some level,” Darien said. “It looks wonderful on a resume.” Ben Ponder, a ninth-grader, has been on Team Reboot, made mostly of DeKalb County homeschoolers, for two years. In the Peachtree Re gional competition, his team came in 58 out of 66 during the qualifica tion round. “I just love technology,” said the 14-year-old who started robotics five years ago in the FIRST Lego League. “I love being able to get hands on [experience], knowing wiring and just being able to interact with the robot-knowing I’ve accom plished building a robot,” Ben said. “Not a lot of kids can say that.” Ben, who plans to enter the information technology field, de scribed his robotics experience as great. “I wouldn’t stop it,” he said. “It’s an awesome experience.”
