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Middle School Robotics Club Raking in Honors

MMVMS VEX Club proving that robotics is way cooler than its reputation.

They wear the standard teenager uniform: jeans, sneakers, an assortment of hooded sweatshirts. At first, they hesitate to make prolonged eye contact when asked a question, often smiling down at the bits and pieces of hardware in their hands rather than looking up. Until you ask about their robot, that is.

Then the members of the VEX Robotics Club come alive.

Listening to animated and impressively explained descriptions of omni wheels, parallel linkage, gears and limit switches, it becomes obvious exactly how the VEX Club (named thusly for the VEX Robotics Design System the club uses to build and compete) has managed to win both the in December and the in January: These kids know their stuff.

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During the interview, Brendan McGonagle, a Melrose High senior from the high school's iRaiders robotics club, wanders into the space that the VEX Club and iRaiders share at MHS. He smiles at the VEX members, Colin Hegarty, Joe Valente, Matt Mroz, Kyle Yee and Abraham Zimmerman, as they demonstrate their award-winning robot.

"Some kids think it's just for geeks. It's not," McGonagle, also a varsity football player, explained.

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It's also not just another school budget-supported club. Formed only five months ago by Colin Hegarty, whose father Kevin acts as coach, the VEX Club at present includes five eighth-graders, all of whom previously knew each other from the MMVMS math team and had already dabbled in LEGO robotics. Other than the workshop space they share with the high school's iRaiders and the early support of MMVMS principal Tom Brow, there is no formal connection between Melrose Public Schools and the VEX Club.

All VEX Club funding thus far has either been covered out-of-pocket or with help from the iRaiders. Coach Hegarty recently made funding requests to Melrose's Victoria McLaughlin Foundation and the Melrose Rotary Club, but for now monetary support is still shaky at best.

Team impresses competition and mentors

Funding isn’t foremost on VEX Club members' minds, though. Instead, they're focused on their upcoming April trip to the 2011 VEX Robotics World Championship, to be held at Disney World. The group already wowed December and January's regional audiences with their robot's success in autonomous (non-driver-controlled) scoring competitions, racking up early points before other teams even started scoring.

“A lot of [other] teams couldn’t do any scoring. They could just move around and push around other robots,” Colin Hegarty said modestly, referring to the need for teams’ robots to score by lifting (and, if possible, removing) rings from posts. “Winning was very cool. [Boston] was a high-school competition and there was only only other middle-school team. We beat all the high-school teams, basically."

When it comes to the driver-controlled part of competitions, every one of the five VEX Club members get a turn. However, team members readily admit that they each have their individual talents. Colin Hegarty works on the bulk of the robot’s programming, using VEX-specific graphics-based software, something he taught himself from YouTube videos. Valente does “whatever needs to be done,” including detailed work on the robot’s claw, both things Mroz also works on. Yee is the team’s lead driver, and Zimmerman concentrates on design issues.

“I’m more of an artsy person; I do most of the drawings. I’m not the best builder,” Zimmerman explained, smiling.

The team’s coach thinks all the members are pretty amazing, especially considering what they have accomplished in such a short period of time.

“They’re a really high-achieving bunch of kids,” Kevin Hegarty said. “I don’t have to lead them. Just round them up and get them focused.”

Besides Coach Hegarty’s hours of contribution and the advice of various iRaiders members and their coach, James Horne, the VEX Club has also benefited from the support of William Langford. The Tufts University junior, along with other members of the Tufts Robotics Club that Langford started two years ago, agreed to take on a mentoring role for the Melrose teams after Horne contacted him last summer.

“It's been great working with them. They're definitely a very sharp bunch,” Langford said of the VEX students. “There were many occasions when we were working out the geometry of the robot and they totally surprised me in how quickly they could do the math of adding weird fractions like 5-3/16" to 2-7/8". They were usually far quicker than me.” 

Langford was also impressed with the middle-schoolers’ determination in solving weedy mechanical issues.

“Whenever we came across a design problem I liked to let them take the lead on figuring out what we could do about it and they often came up with great solutions,” Langford said. “A great example was when we were building the parallel linkage arm. [After learning that the motor was too weak,] they came up with a second design that used a gear reduction to increase the torque of the motor and allowed one motor to lift one side of the arm. It wasn't very reliable, though, and the gears weren't meshing properly. When my Tufts group next returned, the VEX students had not only totally fixed the gear problem, they had built the other side of the arm as well and had a fully functioning lifting arm.” 

Future of VEX Club

With only a few months remaining in the school year and all of the current VEX members headed to high school this September, the future of the fledgling but successful club is still up in the air. At the world championship, the VEX challenge for the 2011-2012 school year will be announced. Coach Hegarty hopes that, once the challenge is revealed, it will be easier to recruit this year’s MMVMS sixth and seventh graders.

For iRaiders coach James Horne, there’s the hope that at least some of the VEX Club members will end up as iRaiders, where they will work with FIRST Robotics, a design system associated with $12 million in scholarships and a grant rate of one-in-three for all who apply.

For now, the VEX Club is focusing on its trip to the world championship. This focus means checking gear ratios and high-strength chains, repeatedly testing the robot’s parallel arms and trying to decide if the surprisingly simple rubber bands they recently added to create friction actually make a difference in the robot’s performance.

Of course, there’s also the issue of keeping the robot safe and sound until it makes its debut at Disney World.

“We’re very protective of our robot,” Zimmerman says, grinning.

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