By Jeff Clemetson | Editor

Magnolia Science Academy’s rockin’ robotics team

The trophy case at Magnolia Science Academy just got a bit more crowded thanks to the school’s robotics club.

“With the robotics club, we [compete in] the FIRST Lego League (FLL),” robotics instructor and team coach Deniz Kocoglu said. “It’s a pretty popular competition around the world. There are around 400 teams participating in Southern California.”

Kocoglu’s teams of seventh- and eighth-grade students are divided up into several task groups in order to build each robot.

Project managers implement the robot’s tasks according to the theme of the competition. This year’s theme was trash and recycling so the Magnolia students built a robot that completed tasks related to composting.

Next, the team’s builders and coders go to work building the robot’s mechanisms using a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit and programming its functions on a computer.

“It’s kind of like block coding but more advanced,” eighth-grader Taylor Lionetti said. “You connect the computer to the robot and all the information transfers to the robot and then cords go everywhere to all the different motors and that’s how it works.”

Lionetti said this was her first year on the team, and she plans on continuing studying robotics when she enters high school next year.

“It was a really fun experience,” she said. “Building the robot was something new, programming the robot was something new.”

Competing in and winning robotics competitions is not new for Magnolia. This year’s trophies are just the latest additions to the robotics program’s many achievements, Principal Gokhan Serce said. Magnolia teams have competed in the FLL Cup for over eight years and have also competed in an underwater robotics league called SeaPerch Two Magnolia students even went to Romania to compete in a Sumo Robot competition.

This year, the MSA Machines team brought home the First Place Robot Performance award in the FLL Cup held on Jan. 23 at Legoland. There were 66 teams from Southern California in the competition.

Magnolia’s other team, the MagnoBricks, won the FLL Cup’s First Place Robot Performance award at the Jan. 24 competition and also took home the First Place Core Values Inspirational Award at the Southern California FLL Championship Tournament held in Chula Vista on Dec. 6.

Coach Kocoglu is especially proud of winning the Core Values award.

“It is related to being a good team, to have good spirit, to show professionalism and at the same time show you are working with other students and communities,” he said.

The idea of teamwork is so important to the competition that there are special core values managers in every team.

“The core values position is to make sure everybody is being a team, cooperating together and making decisions together, basically make sure everyone is on task and doing what they’re supposed to do,” eighth-grader Eric Thomas said.

Fostering cooperation was one of the team’s biggest challenges, seventh-grader Quincy Puffer said.

“In general, a problem with our team was getting everyone’s ideas to fit into the robot — considering everyone’s ideas,” he said.

Another major challenge for the team happened during the competition when the robot’s color sensors mysteriously stopped working.

“It’s kind of unexplained as of yet,” seventh-grader Gabriel Reed said. “We think they might have been a little too close to the table but when we got to the competition they either broke or stopped working so our robot was pretty much blind.”

FLL robots are autonomous during the competition. Once they are set to do their task, they are not remote-controlled and the team can only hope that all the mechanisms work and all the programming is accurate enough for it to do its tasks.

“When you first start the robot and it goes out, you get that feeling that you have to trust the robot no matter what and then when it doesn’t [do what it should] you get the feeling that you want to flip over the table,” said Miguel Talamantez, another seventh-grader on the robotics team, adding “seeing the robot actually work” is his favorite part of competitions.

Now that the FLL competitions are done, the robotics club will begin forming teams to compete in the underwater SeaPerch league “which involves building a robot out of [PVC] pipes, installing motors, and then building the motor control and then controlling the robot under the water to fulfill certain missions,” Coach Kocoglu said.

Preparing for the underwater competition is a challenge for the Magnolia team because the school does not have permanent pool. Last year, the team used a portable pool which was set up in the auditorium.

However, the Magnolia robotics team is confident it has the winning formula to overcome the challenge.

“You basically focus as a team and work together to create a robot, a project, and be the best for the school,” eighth-grader Diane Cao said. “But not only that, you have to have fun with your team. And the best part is when your robot works.”

––Write to Jeff Clemetson at [email protected].