For the last year, students on the New Hope High School Robotics team have spent countless hours designing, building and programming robots inside a warehouse behind the middle school.
In May, they will take their creations to the world championship after a year of successful regional tournaments and two state championship titles won last month.
“It was just a whole lot of emotion,” freshman Ashton Martin said of winning at the state competition. “We didn’t know exactly how we were going to do because it is our first year in (the high school competition), and we were facing a lot better teams. We actually just played our best and did really well. We were super excited.”
New Hope was one of 24 programs to qualify for the state competition this year, where teams compete in a game designed to test their programming, driving and strategy skills. The two teams who won state titles will travel to the VEX Robotics World Championship May 5 in Dallas.
NHHS STEM and ACT Prep instructor Susie Oglesby took over the program when her son, who has since graduated, was in elementary school. Since then, it has grown tremendously, she said.
For nine of the 10 years the program has existed, New Hope has taken home a state title. At least one team has advanced to the world championships every year since 2019 despite being a strictly after-school program.
“The program is geared for (first-graders) all the way to (seniors). There’s no one that wants to volunteer after school, and there’s not a program that’s offered in the classes,” Oglesby said. “A lot of the programs, let’s just say the coast of Mississippi, have over 44 teams, and they have a robotics class in elementary, middle and high school.”
Freshman Tullos Walker, who competes on a two-man team with Martin, doubles as the programmer and strategist for the team, which are allowed a maximum of three members. The game for this year’s competition, he said, is basically a fancy ring toss called “High Stakes.”
“We have these goals that we can move across the field,” Walker said. “We try to get rings that are all over the field onto these goals. The more you score, the more points you get.”
Together Martin and Walker took home the state title for the skills competition, a separate event in which they have one minute to prove their driving and programming skills.
“You have a robot alone on the field and one minute to score as much as possible,” Walker said. “So you have driver skills, where he just drives and scores as much as possible, and programmer skills, where you can’t control (the robot). It’s just the program trying to score as much as possible.”
New Hope students – sophomores Cooper Shepherd, Andrew Bozeman and Logan Powell – won the state title for the High Stakes tournament, qualifying their team for the world championship.
Now the students are perfecting their robots and their skills before the world championship in May. For the tournament team, that means a lot of practice on the game board. But the skills team, which decided to break down and rebuild its robot from scratch, has a bit more work to do.
The after-school program takes over the robotics lab each Saturday for six-hour practice sessions. Martin said having time to prepare is crucial when their competitors have the advantage of spending time on robotics during school hours too.
“Sometimes before tournaments, (Oglesby) will open the shop every day that week and let us stay late,” Martin said. “So sometimes it’s like 15 hours. You’ve got to be dedicated to be good at it.”
At the world championship, the teams will be two of more than 14,000 from 53 countries. While it can be nervewracking, Martin said what he is most looking forward to is testing their skills against the competition.
“What I love the most is just seeing how well we can do against such great competition,” Martin said. “These teams are really good, and just seeing how you progress and get better is the best feeling.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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