EDUCATION
The Robomonkeys robotics team at Turner Woods Elementary School made it to the top eight at the state competition this year out of over 400 teams in Georgia.
Rachael Williams, Turner Woods K-5 gifted teacher and robotics coach, said she was very proud of her students. The teacher said they have learned a lot this year.
“This is the first year we’ve had a robotics competition in person due to COVID-19, so there hasn’t really been a team until this year. We did some things virtually, but them being at competitions is more important,” she said. “This is a brand-new team composed of fourth and fifth graders here at Turner Woods, but with how the competitions are set up, they actually compete with fourth through eighth graders.”
Williams said she’d like to expand the robotics team to the middle schools in Jones County if any of the middle school teachers are interested in taking that on. She said there were four components to the competition they attended recently. They had an energy theme this year, and they had to research some type of problem with it.
The teacher said the problem her students found was the overuse of fossil fuels and trying to create a cleaner type of energy. She said they spoke to people from Georgia Power, Green Energy and Environment Georgia about different types of energies. She said they had to find out what would be the best thing to build for a prototype.
“They talk to professionals, get advice and feedback from them, and come up with the solution to that problem. Then they have to build a robot for competition. They build attachments for the missions they have at competition, and they are judged based on their missions,” she said.
Williams said they also do a lot of teamwork and understand core values. She said it’s all about how they work as a team, how they include each other and how they share the information they have received.
“The last part is the challenge course,” she said. “They have two and half minutes to finish as many challenges as they can on that challenge course. They chose those challenges based on how many points it gives them, how difficult it is to code, if the attachments will work for it, and then does it make sense to do this mission before another on the course. There’s a lot of planning and trial and error.”
Jonah Bresse, a fifth grader on the robotics team at Turner Woods, said he joined the robotics team, because he knew a lot of his friends were joining, plus he liked coding. He said his favorite thing about robotics is coding a robot and using that coding to do missions on the course. He said practicing on the course was his favorite thing about competition.
“I think the Robomonkeys at Turner Woods is important, because it helps you learn new things like coding and helps convince the world to come up with cleaner energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. I’ve learned to work in a team better and code due to robotics. I’ve learned to write stuff professionally,” the student said.
The coach said the Robomonkeys are a student-led team, but the coaches are around for support. She said they won the robot design, and their scores at regional qualified them for super regional in Columbus. The scores at super regional qualified them for state. Williams said two teams will go to nationals. She said the Robomonkeys made it to the top eight in the state out of 480 teams this school year.
“My favorite thing about coaching these kids is seeing their growth as individuals and as a team. This is such a neat group of kids; they’ve come such a long way,” she said. “Quite a few of these kids said they want to go on to be engineers and do robotics. They’ll have a very good background to go into that.”
