Bainbridge Middle School Robotics Club preps for Interleague Competition

Published 11:20 am Sunday, January 17, 2016

Bainbridge Middle School Robotics Club is in the middle of its second competitive season and is having some unexpected success.

The club, made up of middle school students from Woodward, Odyssey and Hyla, fielded two teams — Binary Robotics (8745) and The Circuit Breakers (9374) — in the FIRST Technical Challenge. FIRST (For Inspirations and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a national organization that was formed to encourage interest in math, science and technology through robotics.

Both Bainbridge teams competed in two FTC league events in November and December against nine high school teams from the greater Seattle area. The nine opposing teams were from Franklin, Vashon and Garfield high schools and Seattle Academy.

In the first league event, Binary Robotics claimed third place with a solid performance, while Circuit Breakers struggled through a series of connectivity and center of gravity problems and ended the day in ninth.

In the second league event, Circuit Breakers shocked the field finishing in first place after putting in five solid runs and managing to combine with the Seattle Academy’s Tesseract team to put up the highest single round score in the state so far this year.

Unfortunately, it was Binary Robotics turn to struggle with connectivity issues and they placed eighth.

The club has been preparing for its Interleague Competition, scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 16 at Cascade High School in Everett.

Both Bainbridge teams will compete with 36 other teams from all around Western Washington in hopes of advancing on to the state tournament on Jan. 31.

Because of the teams solid performances so far, Circuit Breakers have an interleague ranking of sixth while Binary Robotics is ranked 14th.

This is a significant improvement from last year, when the teams were ranked at 35th and 36th, respectively.

“We really had a lot to learn about designing reliably and robustly” said Paul Sullivan, the club’s faculty advisor.

“That and the returning kids brought back some great life lessons from last season,” he added.

The Middle School Robotics Club was founded in 2014 in large part due to generous grants from the Bainbridge Schools Foundation, the Bainbridge Community Foundation and Bainbridge Island Rotary, and with encouragement from BHS’s Spartronics Robotics Club founder Enrique Chee.

The club’s faculty advisors are Sullivan and Sean Eaton. This year’s adult mentors include Herman Vroom, Clint Pells, Mike Houser, Steve Wagner, Michael Lincoln, Jim Carr and John Sachs.

Binary Robotics student team leaders are Katie Yoson and Elisabeth Leung. Team members are Zoe Pells, Peter Hall, Martin Vroom, Travis McCoy, Marc Freeman-Sheehy, Isaiah Ballou, Jacob Barfield, Jackson Cross, Lucas Nally, Linda Lincoln, Aryton Perry and Darwin Clark.

Circuit Breakers student team leaders are Christopher Mentzer and Abby Sullivan. Team members are Justice James, Joey Linford, Parker Hutchinson, Ryan Olney, Cory Houser, Ben Kulfan, Ella Zachariah, Luke Shields, Alexander Massa, Kaedric Holt, Brenden Fuller, Gabriel Titos, Declan Freeman-Gleason and Chris Wagner.