OMMS students prepare for robotics competition

Students from the Oak Mountain Middle School robotics team will compete in the BEST Robotics Competition at UAB this weekend.

BEST, short for Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology, brings together 32 middle and high school teams for a two-day competition. Teams have six weeks to plan and build their robot.

This year, robotics teams had to build a robot that could gather minerals and ores from a mine. OMMS students created the Oak Mountain Mining Company, which consists of a design/programming team, marketing team and a spirit and sportsmanship team.

Sherri Whitehead, robotics teacher at OMMS, said the robotics portion is only 15 percent of the total score and the competition includes skills other than engineering.

“They have the whole business side of it,” she said. “They’re learning the business side of things because they have to create a marketing booth that they build, take down and reassemble.”

In addition to marketing, students have the chance to hone speaking skills during a presentation, use language arts knowledge to build an engineering portfolio and work with math and science to construct the robot.

To build a robot, the team starts by brainstorming in words or photos what features the robot should have to complete the assigned task. Those ideas come together to make a final design.

“We took all those brainstorming ideas, and we basically made a combination of things many students did,” Whitehead said.

The group went through about three different designs, modifying their plans in order to make paper plans into a reality.

“When you have something on paper and put it into practice and you build it, what you have on paper doesn’t necessarily work,” Whitehead said.

The team will compete at UAB on Oct. 9 and Oct. 10. More information about the competition can be found on the UAB School of Engineering website.