In its first year of competition, the Great Brook School robotics team qualified for and competed in the VEX World Championships.
Coach Rick Mellin traveled with the team, comprised of six sixth-grade girls, to Dallas from May 7 to 10. The competition included 791 teams from 40 different nations.
“It was a bit of a surprise,” said Mellin of qualifying for the championship. “It was a big learning curve for me and the kids. It was all new for us.”
“It was kind of scary to go so far away from home,” said Jayla Syrotchen, a member of the team.
Between interviews, the girls talked to each other about their other classwork and encouraged each other to do well. They also discussed and demonstrated some of their ideas and driving for the 2023 VEX IQ challenge, named “Slapshot.” These discussions included mentions of multiple scientific fields, notably physics and engineering. One of the members of the team, Fiona McKinney, is homeschooled. She switched to homeschooling partway through this school year, but elected to continue with robotics, anyway.
In addition to the team supporting each other, Mellin plays an important role as their coach.
“I didn’t like it last year, but Rick convinced me to come back,” said Jayla.
“Rick’s epic,” added Josie Hodsdon, another team member.
The duration of the team’s practice was punctuated by joking with Mellin, and the girls relished in relaying funny stories about him from their time in Dallas.
The 2022 game was called “Pitching In,” and involved students directing their robots to get balls into goals. The competition was broken into three segments. One segment had students working together with a team from another school to score points. Another segment had teams driving only their own robots to score points, and the third segment required the teams to program their robots to complete the challenge on its own.
“The programming was interesting because we got three tries,” said Mallory Mason, a member of the team whose main role is driving the robots. “The first two times, the field was too sticky. The last try, we had to do the coding and switch the wheels in like five minutes, and we got 44 points, which was pretty good.”
Mallory was correct about the score being impressive, as the GBS team scored in the top 10% of all teams in the programming portion of the competition.
According to Mellin, the team members were nervous to drive their robot in front of so many people. Although they performed well, the competition was about the experience, more than the score, he said.
“I think they got a lot of confidence from that. Half the kids had never been on an airplane, it was huge. And they got to meet all these teams from all around the world,” said Mellin, adding that booth for the Morocco team was right across from Great Brook School’s booth.
Although the team is excelling in their technical and programming skills, Mellin feels that robotics teaches other things of equal or higher importance.
“These kids are in sixth grade; the technology will be totally different by the time they graduate college,” he said. “But they learn how to think on their feet, and that will carry with them.”
In the male-dominated world of robotics and STEM, Mellin feels there’s huge significance to the fact that this team was made up of all girls.
“There’s a lot of evidence that girls in their middle school years feel social pressure to move away from STEM. They’re supposed to be bad at math and science,” he said. “Working with girls in the fifth and sixth grade before that social pressure sets in helps them to recognize their skill, and they’re less likely to move away from STEM as that social pressure mounts.”
The team members also appreciate the gender makeup of their team. When asked if they like being an all-girls team, all six members responded in unison with a resounding “Yes!”
Aside from keeping them interested in STEM, Mellin feels his team has learned other important, lifelong lessons from robotics.
“There are a lot of smart kids, and especially smart girls (on this team), and smart girls don’t like to be wrong,” he said. “But in robotics, there is no correct answer. You have to embrace mistakes. It’s a great lesson. It’s an activity where you learn how to think. They learn to persevere, because you’ll never get it right the first time.”