IT DOESN’T GET ANY ‘BOT’TER THAN THIS! — Members of the St. Mary Robotics Team are (top row, left to right) Lorraine Ariail, Coach Mike Lohrum, Matthew Dehr, Colleen Semmler, Brandon Akers and Thomas Johnson; and (bottom row, left to right) Nicholas Bryant, Zachary Bryant, Bradley Prosser, Ashlin Grover, Madeline Cullen, Henry Rybolt, Kelsey Morrison and Christopher Haas.
EDWARDSVILLE - For the third year in a row, St. Mary School beat out high school and middle school teams from around the Midwest to capture first place in the 2008 Greater St. Louis Botball Robot Tournament, held at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. St. Mary held an assembly to honor the winners on Friday, May 9, when the team and their robots took over the gym.
Winners include eighth-graders Brandon Akers, Lorraine Ariail, Madeline Cullen, Matthew Dehr, and Colleen Semmler; seventh-graders Nicholas Bryant, Ashlin Grover, Christopher Haas, Bradley Prosser and Henry Rybolt; and sixth-graders Zachary Bryant, Thomas Johnson and Kelsey Morrison. The team is coached by Michael Lohrum and organized by seventh-grade teacher, Diane Toon.
Botball is a national robotics competition for high school and middle school students designed to engage them in using science, technology, engineering, and math to build and program an autonomous robot. Representatives from each team are invited to regional workshops in late winter, when they receive rules and identical kits for the upcoming tournament. Teams have approximately six weeks to build and test their robots before regional competition.
Lohrum hands over the project to the team shortly after the workshop, and mentors them from strategy through finished robot.
Lohrum said he respects their passion to learn and their craving to engineer a robot and marvels at the level of robotics the students tackle in this competition. "These are the same controllers the collegiate teams use. That's impressive," he said.
Lohrum's students may find his penchant for the repetitive engineering process exhausting, but he's not satisfied until the last bug is worked out. When something goes wrong, he doesn't reveal the answer. "He just says, ‘Fix it!'" comments eighth-grader Lorraine Ariail.
Ariail has been on the team for two years and plans to continue with robotics in high school. "Regionals were a lot more competitive this year. I was impressed by the other teams, and I think it's just going to get tougher next year," she said. Ariail enjoys programming the robots. Her teammate, Matt Dehr, also in eighth grade, finds the "tedious work" of building with small parts and isolating programming errors the most exciting. Matt's own basement became team headquarters, where practice took place three or four times a week prior to competition.
Principle Peg Bodinet said she is extremely pleased with the team's performance. She said the school has been deliberately "upping the ante" in math and science for a few years now.
"Our students rank in the 89th percentile in science," she said. "Those aren't honors students. That's the main student body. We've also got a fantastic science lab and teachers who are excited about math and science. These subjects have a home at St. Mary!"
Bodinet believes programs like robotics bring a positive feeling about math and science to each student. "This program taught them that they are capable of pursuing higher math and science. Robotics put ‘structural engineering' in their everyday vocabulary and they can actually see themselves making that career choice one day."
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