2/12/2012

By GARY DEMUTH

Salina Journal

Launching a basketball into a series of hoops is the objective of Sergio Cois and his team.

They just have to rig a robot to do it.

Cois, 16, is captain of the robotics team at St. John's Military School. He and his team are in the process of putting together a metal robotic unit that will move by computerized remote control, whisk a small foam basketball to a 60-inch height through a pulley system, and then shoot it into one of four hoops set at different levels.

"We're still in a bit of the design phase," said Cois, a junior at St. John's. "We're trying to make it as simple as possible. Last year, we went too complicated and ended up with nothing."

Cois and his robotics team were trying to perfect their robot in time to enter a regional robotics competition March 1-3 in Kansas City, Mo. Last year the objective at the competition was to create a robotic device that would travel across a room, pick up various inflatable objects and put them on pegs several feet off the ground.

"Last year was our first year doing this," said Caelon Tautz, 15, a St. John's freshman. "We think we've got a better design this year."

The 12-member St. John's robotics team showed off their basketball-shooting robot Saturday to appreciative crowds at the Third Annual Science, Technology and Health Fair, sponsored by J.C. Penney.

The fair took place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. near the J.C. Penney store in Salina's Central Mall.

Demonstrating science and technological projects were students from Kansas Wesleyan University, Lakewood Middle School and local elementary schools, as well as the robotics teams from St. John's and Salina Central High School.

This is the Central robotic team's third year as a school club. Like the St. John's robotics team (whom the Central team helped get started last year), Central students are building a basketball-shooting robot. However, they're preparing to take their creation to a robotics competition in Denver in March.

The objective of both competitions is the same, said Lee Scherman, an engineering major at Kansas State University, who mentors the Salina Central robotics club.

"Each year at the competitions, it's a different game," said Scherman, who belonged to a robotics club at Paola High School. "This year, it's a basketball shooting game."

Robots will be pitted against each other during the competition, he said, trying to outmaneuver each other and shoot foam basketballs into a series of four hoops set at different levels: three points will be given for the highest hoop, two for the middle hoops and one for the bottom hoop.

"It's a sport, but you don't try to damage the other robots," Scherman said. "You have to show you play well with others. (Robotics) is about teamwork, as well as solving problems and learning a little something about engineering."

That's why Salina Central freshmen Ben Koening, 14, and Manny West, 15, decided to join the robotics club this year.

"I like to overcome obstacles and have to figure out what's wrong and solve it," Koening said.

"I like building everything as a team," West said. "Basically, I do whatever Lee tells me."

St. John's Military School is all about teamwork, and that is reflected in the robotics club, said Anna Robles, a science teacher at St. John's.

"There's a spot for everyone on the team," she said. "They don't just do one thing."

Robotics wasn't the only scientific demonstration at the fair. Students had booths set up throughout the south end of the mall, where they created exploding balloons, tested acidity in drinks, demonstrated how a three-way switch worked and proved which soda was most effective in eroding a penny.

Lakewood Middle School seventh-grader Justin Teth was busy zapping potatoes, carrots and lettuce to see which one recorded the most voltage.

The winner, he said, was the potato.

"It has 4.2 volts," he said. "Carrots only have 2.3."

The Kansas Wesleyan University biology club, in the meantime, displayed a collection of coral sponges and butterflies and bugs under glass to wow passing children.

Cole Walter, a biology major at KWU, said his favorite bug to show off was a large, long-horned wood-boring beetle, native to Central America.

"A lot of little kids don't like looking at it because it's pretty scary," Walter said. "But really, what kid doesn't like bugs?"

-- Reporter Gary Demuth can be reached at 822-1405 or by email at gdemuth@salina.com.

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