OMMS robotics program competes nationally

On a computer across the room, Omar Zuaiter is entering code.

As he hammers commands into the computer, the bulky skeleton of what looks like a tiny piece of construction equipment starts to heave. Twenty feet away, it rolls across a gray mat and swings its top arm down at a red ball. Two rotors on the front of the arm start to spin and, well, the beastly robot wildly misses it’s objective.

“I’m still working it out,” Omar said.

Omar is an eighth-grade member of Team Blunderbuss (named for a pirate pistol), one faction of the robotics program at Oak Mountain Middle School. He and other members of the team spend most of their afternoons in the technology lab at the school, but they spend most of their days thinking about what goes on in there. They scratch robot designs in notebooks they carry around everywhere. 

Not only are he and his teammates learning engineering, in about a year’s time  they’ve become engineers — good ones.

“I’m fourth place in the nation for programming,” Omar said, referring to the 2013 VEX Robotics National Competition. 

This month, Omar, Jadon Bailey, Garrett Tautkus and Ryan Cruce — Team Blunderbuss — are returning to nationals after taking first place in the state competition held in April. They’re confident in their creation, and none of them show the slightest signs of being nervous. 

Maybe it’s because of their track record. In last year’s VEX, OMMS finished in the top 10 in the nation. 

But how they got there is even more inspiring. While other programs have been building for years, OMMS hasn’t.

Two summers ago, there wasn’t much to see in the wood shop at Oak Mountain Middle School.

The shop instructor retired heading into the 2012-2013 school year, leaving the saws silent and the desks empty. Remaining in the room were a giant fish tank and two computers, a wide-open space and a few tools. It wasn’t much to start with for the robotics program. That is, until James Salvant agreed to take it over.

Salvant, owner of a degree in mathematics and a self-professed tinkerer, introduced Project Lead the Way, the nation’s leading STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — curriculum. Shortly after, he helped transform the old shop into a 21st-century learning environment.

“We wanted to do something totally different,” Salvant said. “Something that nobody else was doing.”

Through the Shelby County College and Career Center, the school has spent about $50,000 recreating the woodshop. It’s now home to about 50 of the county’s most powerful engineering computers and, in one corner of the room, a full practice area for VEX Robotics competitions.

The lab has the capability to teach students 3D modeling using the same programs Mercedes-Benz uses to design cars. It can teach not only coding but also automation, and after three years in the program students are capable of building cars, robots, kites and even buildings.

“I’ve learned a lot about coding,” Garrett said. “I’d like to learn C (a popular computer programming language) over the summer. And I can. Because of robotics, my parents bought me computer.”

It’s a testament to how far these students have come. At the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, Omar, Garrett, Jadon and Ryan were seventh-grade students without experience. A semester went by before they even built their first robot. And when they finally got it together in January 2013, it didn’t really meet their expectations.

“Their first competition was a disaster,” Salvant said. “We took a pusher bot and a claw bot, and they got destroyed. They didn’t really like that too much. So afterward they really picked it up.”

By April 2013, Team Blunderbuss had two new robots ready for the state competition — if you can call it that. These inexperienced tinkerers proved to Alabama they weren’t messing around. They crushed the field.

“It was a thorough domination,” Salvant said.

Two months later, the team was in Florida for VEX Nationals, and their fourth-place finish there led to more funding for the program. When the team retuned to the lab as eighth-grade students at the beginning of this year, they had all the resources they needed for a repeat performance.

So far in the 2013-2014 year, OMMS robotics students have designed and built 10 competitive robots. Each is named something fun like Scorpion, Skippy, Zeus or Pinnacle. Heading to this year’s nationals though are Thing1 and Thing 2, essentially identical robots based on a full year of tweaking designs.

But while the team is confident in its chances this month, it’s not sure about what happens next year. When the students move to ninth grade, they won’t be able to spend three to four hours a day in the lab. Worse, there isn’t an official robotics program at Oak Mountain High School.

Salvant said his plan, adding that it’s mostly a sure thing at this point, is to sponsor the high school team and run it out of the middle school lab.

I’ve already fostered these students for a couple years,” he said. “That would be such a waste not to help them keep growing.”

Salvant said he plans to have the high school team come back to the OMMS lab once a week after school, where they can both build their robots and mentor younger students.

“We’re in the process, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen,” he said.

For a team that started with nothing and within a year worked its way to fourth in the nation, confidence abounds.