In First Year, Baldwin Middle School Robotics Club Sees Success

In its first year, the ’s middle school robotics club had a victory at the eastern Pennsylvania regional tournament in January.

Team A—seventh graders Maya Bindra and Stephanie Blank and sixth graders Angela Yang and Sanjana Dixit—of the Baldwin robotics club won the Tournament Champion trophy, in an alliance along with two all-girls teams from Downingtown. 

Last year, team adviser Laura Blankenship was working with Baldwin’s upper school robotics club when she received a few requests from the middle school. The middle school team started with 20 participants, and now 12 that come regularly to the three weekly afternoon meetings from 3:30 to 5 p.m.

“We learned a lot from the last competition,” Blankenship said. “Once they get going, they do a pretty good job.”

Each year, the competition involves a different game, Blankenship said. This year, the competition involves the robots lifting plastic balls and placing them into round goals positioned around a field.

The biggest challenge facing the teams is designing robots that can lift the balls off the ground without tipping over.

Team A worked on fine-tuning their robot last week for the Feb. 4 state championships by adding a lineal slide to raise the arms and tightening all the screws, Bindra said.

“I think it will be better—we’re making our robot better than last time,” she added.

Bindra enjoys putting all the pieces together and figuring out how it will work.

"We kind of draw it, then think of the best materials to use," Blank said.

Then, they can think about how to make it better.

And Yang said she likes being able to start with a basic structure and building onto it.

Building robots involves a lot of trial and error, Blankenship said. Students draw models before attempting to build them. The three teams have taken apart completely and put back together each of their robots five or six times, she said. 

Part of the experience involves writing down each step and taking good notes so that someone else could use them to build the same robot.

Though Blankenship’s Ph.D. is in English, she has always been interested in technology. Her last job was as a technologist at , and she now teaches technology and introductory computer science classes to middle school students at Baldwin.

Blankenship uses some robots in her technology classes, but that involves more programming than building, she said, adding the first time she built a robot was last summer. 

Her classes have programmed robots to dance and interact, and put on a show for the second grade science class.

“I’m not an engineer, which has its pros and cons,” Blankenship said. “I can’t come up with fabulous designs, but they come up with them themselves.”

Unlike the regional competition at the Haverford School, which involved only middle schools students, the Feb. 4 state championships involved 77 teams from both middle and high schools, Blankenship said, which provided the added challenge of competing against older kids.

This weekend, the team is competing in another primarily middle school competition and looks forward to further improving their robots.