Mansfield ISD Robotics Teams Win Big at Qualifier

Mansfield ISD Robotics, home of The Fighting Pickles, Crusading Cucumbers, and Vinegar Vikings, along with UT Arlington hosted a FIRST FTC Robotics Qualifier tournament last Saturday, February 11, 2012. The event was a great success! Everything went close to plan and we had a great crowd, including the Mansfield Mayor Pro Tem, Larry Broseh, his wife and grand-daughter. Every one of all ages thought it was very exciting and fun.

Our three robotics teams all performed beautifully and conducted themselves in a way that all of MISD can be proud of! Unlike many robotics organizations, our group is a completely extra-curricular activity. We have a great student leadership team in place and our teams are student run from designing the robot to planning community event.

Each of our teams won a judged award (and got the trophy to go with it) and they all qualified for the next level of competition, The SouthWest Regional Contest, which will be hosted at UT Arlington on Saturday, March 3, 2012.

Here are the specific judged awards the teams won:

#127 Fighting Pickles - PTC Design Award
Basic Criteria: Robot incorporates industrial design elements in their robot solution which is aesthetic and functional and reflected in the submitted engineering notebook

#3768 Crusading Cucumbers - Connect Award
Basic Criteria: The team is the most connected to the local and engineering community through outreach and giving back

#5393 Vinegar Vikings - Motivate Award
Basic Criteria: The team shows great team spirit and enthusiasm throughout the competition and functions well as a team

The Vinegar Vikings, our newest team, was in 3rd place after the qualifying matches and captained an alliance in the semifinals. The Crusading Cucumbers was chosen as an alliance partner and went on to win the competition (and get the even bigger trophy associated with that).

The three sponsors, Susan Sevier, Robert Goodson, and Kashieka Popkin, all Ben Barber CTA teachers, are very proud to be part of this with these great kids!

The teams are working hard to prepare for the next level of competition. Come check us out Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 3:15 – 5:15 PM at the Ben Barber campus.

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Guest post from Susan Sevier, CS teacher at Ben Barber Career Tech Academy in Mansfield ISD

Robotics students inspire their sponsors

Guest post from Susan Sevier, CS teacher at Ben Barber Career Tech Academy in Mansfield ISD

The Crusading Cucumbers from San Antonio contest

Well, we did it again. Mansfield ISD robotics swept Texas, taking the highest honors at the Alamo and SW Regional FIRST Robotics FTC (First Tech Challenge) contests in Texas.

The Crusading Cucumbers, team #3768, won the “Inspire,” on Thursday March 3, 2011 at the Alamo Regional Championship in San Antonio.

And the Fighting Pickles, team #127, won the same "Inspire" award at the SW Regional contest hosted by UTA two days later on Saturday March 5.

The Inspire award is the highest award FTC gives; it means the team embodies all the aspects FIRST perceives as the model team to promote STEM concepts.
(STEM refers to Scientific, Technological, Engineering, and Mathematical concepts.)


Based on this accomplishment, both teams earned an automatic invite to the FIRST Robotics World Championship in St. Lewis, Missouri in late April.

As if that isn’t enough, The Crusading Cucumbers, also captained the winning alliance team at the Alamo contest and won the whole competitive portion of the Alamo FTC competition. This would also earn them an automatic invite to the world contest, but it got passed on to our friendly alliance partner, The Dragons, team #3937 of South Lake Carroll.

In addition, at the SW contest an 11th grade Summit HS computer science student, Clark Navidad, got offered an internship from a Richardson/Plano area software company. A parent sponsor of a Plano, Jasper HS, team offered this internship based on Clark’s ability to problem solve, communicate and use critical thinking skills to fix all his teams programming problems under the stress of the contest constraints. It was truly impressive. Without Clark’s help the Plano robot would not have been able to compete. Other programming students, helped with at least six other teams at the contest, from updating firmware to setting up and explaining the programming environment.

Finally, while still at the contest, Fighting Pickles programmers, Clark Navidad and Mike Kojder, received word that they had advanced to the national level contests for Business Professionals of America. Clark Navidad will compete in C++ and Mike Kojder will compete in Java programming, at the BPA National contest in Washington DC.

The students were all amazing and the success is almost overwhelming. James Wilson and I were blown away by how all these students went about taking care of business throughout the contest. To say we are beaming with pride would be an understatement. We had teams lining up waiting for our assistance, and even the contest officials were coming to us for help on occasion. We were without a doubt the most spirited teams at each contest.