The following article appeared in the July 29, 2024 edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter featuring smart, original local news for Charlotte. Free and paid subscription plans are available. Learn more here.
The Queen City Robotics Alliance hosts a summer camp for students in grades four through eight that teaches beginner coding skills and lets them build robots out of Lego.
Lindsay Banks
Until a few weeks ago, Jonathan Lesko, a seventh-grader at Kennedy Middle School, had never built or programmed a robot. He was interested in learning, so his mother signed him up for a week-long day camp this summer run by the Queen City Robotics Alliance, a local nonprofit that is home to youth robotics programs and competitive teams.
Over the course of a week, Lesko worked with a novice programming team of fourth through eighth graders to design and build robots out of Lego, then program them to move and push objects.
Twelve-year-old Jonathan caught on quickly, earning the nickname “Master Builder,” and his team spent more than five hours programming a robot that could navigate the corridors of “The Zone,” QCRA’s new facility in Airslee.
All it took for Jonathan to decide he wanted to continue coding throughout the semester and join the team was a week-long robotics camp.
“The master carpenter will be back,” Jonathan said when his mother came to pick him up on the last day of camp.
STEM programs such as robotics are on the rise across the country within school systems and as after-school activities. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics jobs in the United States will grow by about 11% by 2031, more than twice as fast as all other occupations.
This is where programs like the Queen City Robotics Alliance come into play.
QCRA was founded in 2014 in collaboration with FIRST Robotics, an international youth robotics nonprofit, as an umbrella organization for fundraising for competitive teams and events. QCRA’s goal is to close the STEM learning gap for Charlotte-area students. The nonprofit provides scholarships for programs to bring more students from Title I schools into robotics.
When QCRA moved into its new facility nearly a year ago, the nonprofit was able to expand its services and serve as a meeting space and resource for camps, after-school programs and competitive teams. Before The Zone, QCRA relied on schools to host its programs.
Serious competition: QCRA’s summer camps are designed to give students a taste of robotics and help them decide whether to join a competitive team during the school year. Charlotte is home to nearly two dozen local middle and high school teams, with the average high school team size being about 30 students (Team YETI, one of the largest in the area, has about 70 students). [Edited on 7/29/24 at 11:45 a.m. to correct the YETI team name to be all caps.]
The time commitment and structure of a FIRST team is similar to that of a sports team, said Robbie Wheeler, a mechanical instructor for the YETI competition team, who competed on his Hillsboro high school team in the early 2000s.
At the high school level, the competitive season runs from January to April, during which students practice about 20 to 30 hours each week after school and on weekends, said Patrick Kilcoyne, a student and YETI member.
Kilcoyne, a senior at Ardrey Kell High School, works in the mechanical department for the YETI team and told the Ledger he plans to study mechanical engineering in college.
This year’s competitive season has a theme of ocean exploration, with teams from around the world building their robots over a six-week period starting in January, before competing in the league’s first competition, which is usually held in March. The final competition of the season, the World Championships, is usually held in late April.
Parents of high school students typically volunteer to help build QCRA’s practice field while the students begin designing and planning their robots. Wheeler said QCRA’s practice field is the only one of its kind in North Carolina; the next closest model is in Atlanta.
Parent volunteers will be building a practice field at QCRA’s new facility in preparation for the competition season, during which time students will begin designing and building their robots.
The students then spend almost all of their free time preparing their robots for the competition, meeting after school and on weekends at The Zone in Air Three to perfect their designs.
During competitions, which are often held outside of Charlotte, teams compete against each other with their robots to complete specific tasks, such as moving objects like traffic cones to earn points.
More than just robotics: In addition to learning robot programming skills, students also learn marketing and social media skills and how to attract corporate sponsors to fund their team’s activities. The average robot costs about $10,000 to build, so each team must raise funds to cover materials and travel expenses for competitions.
Students on the YETI team who want to take part in the competition must also complete 100 hours of volunteer work in the community, and some, like Kilcoyne, log hours by volunteering at QCRA summer camps.
The competition isn’t all about building the best robot, Wheeler said: YETI received the prestigious FIRST Impact Award at the state championships this year in recognition of the team’s volunteer work in the local community.
Not only are students learning valuable STEM and leadership skills and gaining exposure to future career paths, they are also building a community that spans the globe.
“You’re part of something much bigger than yourself,” Kilcoyne said, “and you’re helping to spread that.”
Lindsey Banks is a reporter for The Ledger: lindsey@cltledger.com
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