Oak Mountain High Tech Solutions, a robotics competition team, is preparing for a BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) competition October 6 at UAB’s Bartow Arena.
The team hopes to compete in sectionals, regionals, and then go to nationals, where it has placed in the top ten in the country over the past few years.
The team is building a custom-designed robot that will compete with others schools. Team members also market the robot in competition and learn about how corporations operate in the process of developing a publicly desired product that is deemed successful by competition results.
On “game day” the different schools all compete on a large playing field in a round-based tournament to complete specific tasks with their robot. Meanwhile, the marketing and creative sections are working to help “sell” the team robot and company to the other schools and prospective buyers (i.e. judges). Although not as glamorous as the robot competition itself, the score counts just as much as the engineering and recorded notebook elements.
This year’s theme is modeled after NASA’s concept of a futuristic space elevator concept. The robot must climb a 10-foot post to deliver and retrieve cargo from a home base.
To learn more about their team, visit oakmountainrobotics.com or email OMHSROBOTICS2012@gmail.com.
