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Texpand, a Cape Town community robotics team ranging in age from 12 to 17, based in Pinelands, is the first South African team to win the first-place Think Award at the First Tech Challenge (FTC) world champs last year, and are the front runners to win the SA Nationals to be held on Saturday 17 February.
Since Texpand started competing in the SA FTC in 2020 it has been ranked number 1 in the game. On Saturday 27 January, Texpand won the Western Cape regionals competition for this year’s season, dubbed CenterStage, unbeaten in all their qualifying matches as well as the semi-final and final matches, “which they played with their selected alliance team.”
FTC is an international robotics competition, which makes a sport out of robotics by organising competitive matches, according to one of the team’s coaches, Michelle Buckle.
“This provides challenging and exciting hands-on opportunities for high-school students to develop practical stem skills, while having fun,” she said.
“They would have qualified for the world championships before 2023, but because of Covid no teams travelled to the world championships for two seasons. But in April last year they went to Texas to represent South Africa at the world championships.”
According to Buckle the team was competitive and won many of their games at the FTC world champs, “but their highlight was winning first-place Think Award, awarded to the team that is best at removing engineering obstacles through creative problem solving and who best reflects the team’s journey through documentation excellence.”
Team Texpand grew through input from the judges and interacting with the other top teams in the world. Their coach was proud to announce their performance was deserving of placing first on the world stage.
“They came back encouraged to keep on expanding robotics as a sport and learning platform in SA and to expand their own competence,” noted Buckle.
She said Texpand are the front runners to win the SA national competition, which will be held in Cape Town on Saturday 17 February. Two top teams from the national competition will qualify for the 2024 world championships.
“Texpand are working at building their robot to a standard that could get them into the world championship knock-out finals this season.” The two top teams from SA Nationals qualify to go to the 2024 FTC World Champs to be held in Houston Texas again this coming April.
A game inspiring learning and creativity
The FTC robotics competitions provide a fun way for kids to do deepen learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) fields.
“The competitions centre on a game that is played by robots on a 3.6 m x 3.6 m field,” Buckle said. “Each year the game is different, and teams have around four months to design and build a robot to score maximum points in the game.”
This CenterStage season teams will need to score points by collecting hexagonal pixels at various locations and placing them on a backdrop.
Said Buckle: “If the team is able to arrange them in specific patterns they get an extra point. If they stack them high enough on the backdrop they score further bonus points. Teams also score points by launching paper drones consistently into a target zone and by getting their robots to hang on suspended trusses at the end of the game.”
Texpand consists of an interesting mix of members.
“We value and embrace multi-dimensional diversity in the team,” Buckle pointed out, “and this covers racial diversity, neurodiversity, geographic – urban (Pinelands, Mitchell’s Plain, Claremont, Simonstown) and rural (Grabouw and Robertson), age diversity (12-17), gender diversity and socio-economic diversity.”
She said volunteer coaches may not necessarily be skilled in robotics, but they are required to help members make connections to STEM professionals and other more experienced robotics teams to access help and learning resources needed to achieve their goals.
Three main robotic building skills
- Mechanical – involves designing and building mechanical systems consisting of motors, shafts, gears, slides, grippers, arms, conveyer belts, and whatever is required to perform tasks efficiently and effectively, scoring points for each team.
- Programming – involves coding instructions that control various motors in various mechanical systems in a way that takes into account input from the environment using sensors (distance sensors, cameras, colour sensors and so on) and driver input.
- Computer-aided design (CAD) – involves creating 3D designs for custom parts, which are crafted to match the required mechanical function exactly so they can be 3D printed and integrated into the mechanical system, where there is no commercially available part. “Texpand’s robot has more than 50 custom 3D printed and metal integrated parts when competing,” Buckle bragged.
- Then there are other important, but less technical roles on the team, which include:
- Research – to research what the best teams in the world are doing so that the team can keep up with the latest ideas and technologies.
- Media – they produce their own videos and post regularly on Instagram and YouTube where they have secured 1 000s of views from all over the world.
- Scouting/strategy – involves understanding the capabilities of other teams and their robots at any competition. “The team then develops alliance partner strategies which factor in the strengths and weaknesses of their robot and that of their alliance partner’s, to work out the best strategy for working together in the game.”
For Buckle and the Texpand team the competition is much more than robots.
“In fact, progression in the competition is primarily based on winning judged awards which assess engineering, innovation and industrial design, problems solving, business planning, fundraising and outreach initiatives.”
The game is important, she pointed out, “but winning it does not get the most highly-prized award”.
- Anticipating Team Texpand's promising winning streak to qualify as one of two South African teams to represent at the FTC world champs in Houstin Texas in April this year, a Back-a-Buddy campaign has been launched. They currently seek support in order to afford each member the opportunity to represent their country. Visit this link: https://www.backabuddy.co.za/texpand-ftc-5826906396642016318
