A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Cloquet wins rookie award
There was fine-tuning of the SubZero robot from Esko Saturday between playoff matches on the team's way to a championship at the FIRST Robotics regional in Duluth. Concentrating here are team mentor Logan Mills (back to camera), and, left to right, Isabelle Cloose, pit crew captain; Sara Omberg, electrical mentor; Sarah Stueber, drive team technician; Samantha Stueber, pit crew; coach Justin Scheider; and Ben Holt, pit crew.
The RipSaw Robotics team from Cloquet is moving on to national competition next month after earning a "rookie" award at the FIRST Robotics regional matches in Duluth last week. This is the first year that Cloquet High School has fielded a robotics team.
Esko earned robotics glory at the regional with successful playoff battles run by, from left, Eli Rud, defensive specialist coach; Carsen Jones, game piece manipulator; Camden Jones, robot driver and co-captain; and Skylar Wohling, drive team coach, lead strategist and co-captain.
Among the din of the pits in Pioneer Hall in Duluth, adjacent to the DECC Arena where robots were going head to head before a raucous crowd, the SubZero robotics team from Esko was quietly and systematically fine-tuning its machine for another run on the floor.
Whatever they did, it worked.
Esko won its next face-off and then the playoff title to qualify for the FIRST Robotics world championship in April in Detroit. The win at the Duluth regional last weekend also means the team will likely qualify for the state tournament in May.
More than 120 teams participated in the FIRST Robotics Regional competition at the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center last week. It was a combination of large school- and smaller school regionals and the DECC Arena was packed with fans watching two competition areas on the arena floor. Five teams from Carlton County competed across three days beginning last Thursday in the Lake Superior region, including the teams from Carlton, Cloquet and Esko.
This is the first year of competition for the Cloquet team, which also qualified for the Detroit championship after winning the "Rookie Inspiration" award. That honor recognizes "success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers, both within their school, as well as in their community."
First-year teams have to earn the award - it isn't a mere consolation prize for rookies - and it isn't always handed out at regional competitions.
Overall, the RipSaw robotics team from Cloquet had four wins and five losses in the qualifying round and didn't make it to the playoffs. It was ranked 32nd out of the 63 teams in the regional.
Carlton's Doomsday Dogs went 4-4-1 in the qualifying round and also missed the playoffs. It was ranked 27th out of the 63 teams.
Esko was a pedestrian 4-5 in the qualifying round but made the playoffs and went 6-1 with its alliance to win the championship.
The Duluth event was a combination of two regionals with schools divided by experience - Lake Superior and Northern Lights - making it one of the largest regional FIRST competitions in the country.
Robotics is a year-round school activity with teams forming in the fall and then receiving their "challenge" in January. That's when teams are told how the season's competition will be set up, and what the parameters are for robot construction in the six weeks before regionals. The theme this year was designed to simulate maneuvering a rover on a distant planet, called "Destination: Deep Space."
At the regional, alliances are formed after qualifying, as multiple robots are in the competition space gaining points by performing functions such as grasping balls and depositing them into bins and other tasks. There are offensive and defensive robots.
The Esko team joined with teams from Badger and Nevis in the playoffs.
"Our role was to keep opposing alliance robots from scoring points and to protect our alliance members from other defensive robots trying to do the same to our alliance," Esko coach Laura Zimny said. "We were highly effective in our role and were able to win our home regional."
Helping on the coaching staff are Jerry Frederick and Justin Schneider. Robotics is a community activity, and students also get mentoring from a host of people in the community, Zimny said. There are 30 SubZero students, 21 girls and 9 boys.
