By JESSA PEASE / Staff Writer

PELHAM— After participating in UAB’s BEST Robotics competition, Pelham High School’s robotics team is preparing for its next challenge: The Nothing But Net VEX competition.

The students are programming the brain of the VEX robots through a computer so they can control them using an Xbox-like remote. The robots cost about $1,000 a piece and the robots will be judged on their design.

“A lot of it too is going through the engineering process,” said robotics instructor Tim Cobb. “What does it have to do? Let’s draw the picture and go through the idea of designing it, building it, troubleshooting it, programing it, going back and changing it.”

At the Nothing But Net competition the students will utilize multiple robots to score points. One is designed to shoot 4-inch stress balls into hoops and the other is designed to retrieve the balls afterward.

Christian Goecke, a senior in the robotics elective, participated in Spain Park’s robotics program before he moved to Pelham, and he helped start it two years ago at Pelham.

In its first year, the robotics program was part of the Academic Opportunities period at the high school, but the students only met for an hour each week. Now the elective is the “skinny” period, so the students have four hours a week to collaborate.

“My favorite part is when something doesn’t work,” Goecke said. “It’s not the satisfaction of knowing you got it working, it’s the satisfaction of know when there is a problem you can fix it.”

He plans on attending either the University of Alabama in Huntsville or Ohio State to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering and avionics for the air force.

Stephen Daley, Jon Drake and Drew Tyler, all in 11th grade, plan on pursuing careers in engineering when they go to college. Each said they enjoy putting things together, designing, coding and creating new things.

“I’ve always thought it was interesting to just see something and create it and have it actually do what you want it to do, so it’s really cool to have these competitions,” Drake said.

The program started out with only three VEX robots this year, but will be purchasing five more through a grant they received. There will be two to three students per robot once they purchase the new ones.

In the spring, the students will have to design autonomous robots, which are ones that are programed to perform without assistance from a remote. Pelham High School will compete at the University of Alabama with one autonomous robot.

“One of the problems the competitions have is that you can only put in one robot,” Cobb said. “Well, we’ve got 20 kids. We are going to have six or seven robots.”

Because of that, Cobb said they have contacted Lego about hosting a competition at PHS. They would invite the surrounding schools to bring all the robots they have before the big spring competition.

One of the most important things about the elective, according to Cobb is the experience the students will get from the class. VEX robots are part of the second year of the Engineering Academy at Pelham, and the students learn a lot about the engineering process.

Cobb said it mirrors senior projects students would complete in pursuit of an engineering degree at a college level.

“This gives me a good experience of problem solving and just the whole design process,” Daley said. “It’s just something that gives me a little head start.”