by Grace Cardoni
The GS Bots IQ team is building the future of engineering one robot at a time.
Bots IQ is a robot-battling competition created by the Pittsburgh Chapter National Tooling and Machining Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the future careers of high school students.
“They wanted kids to get interested in machining, building, electronics and robotics,” Bots IQ Adviser Mr. Matthew King said. “So they started a program in high schools and some middle schools.”
Each team is tasked with designing and building a 15-pound robot based on the television show BattleBots. The average robot can cost more than $1,000 with all the high-tech parts involved.
“The average bot, if you had to buy everything brand new and not reuse electronics, you would have over $1,000 in it,” Mr. King said.
Students will be headed to the preliminary round, along with 65 other schools at Westmoreland County Community College on March 12. This marks the 19th anniversary of the team at GS.
“We started around two years after the program began,” King said. “So, it’s been about 19 years now; I’ve been on it for 18.”
However, this season looks vastly different from years past. After graduating their entire team last year, the program had to rebuild from the ground up with nine freshmen.
A 3D model of the mock Robot created on Fusion 360.
Photo Courtesy: Brandon Pigza
“This year we had a team scratch, all of us are freshman,” freshman Bots IQ member Peyton Comer said. “It went pretty good with Mr. King since he’s done it previous years.”
Although the team is made up of a brand-new group, many members had experience from their time in the middle school.
“The reason I think they were interested the most out of everyone, is because they were on the team last year in the middle school,” King said.
Although most of the team had taken part previously in middle school, they are running on a tight schedule with the new change.
“We’ve been designing the parts, and we’ve been putting them together on the CAD program to see kind of if it fits together since October,” Comer said. “We haven’t actually built it yet, but the parts are being manufactured.”
Students note that this year has proved to be much more challenging than their experiences before but nonetheless rewarding.
“It’s harder, much more complicated,” Peyton said. “But it’s much better; we are all really looking forward to the final product; the process has been fun.”
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