Tega Cay students helping classmate lands them in robotics world championship

The idea of helping a classmate ended up helping the Hornets Robotics Team right back. Now, Gold Hill Elementary School is sending its comeback kids to the world championship.

“We kind of set the bar a little high,” said lead teacher Matt Rohring, whose school is competing in its rookie robot yet is the first Fort Mill School District team to qualify for worlds.

VEX Robotics competitions, like the robots themselves, have several parts. Teams design, drive and program robots for a variety of tasks to score points. They also complete a STEM research project. One of two Gold Hill teams decided its research project would be The Silent Helper, a device for turning text into audio.

The idea was sparked to help a classmate at school who is selectively mute. Fellow fifth-graders thought they could design something he could use to help in school. Judges have been impressed.

“What really carried us through was our STEM research project,” said Neena Khoja, parent volunteer.

An early iteration of Silent Helper won first place at a February gathering of almost three dozen teams at Sugar Creek Elementary School. The project qualified the team for the March state event despite the squad faring worse on the robot portions.

“Our robot was poo that first round,” said fifth-grader Logan Shope. “I expected us to die then and there.”

Advancing to state meant more time to improve Silent Helper, but also to better their robot performance. The first-year team saw other teams succeed. They modified. By the state event not only did Silent Helper win first in its category, the robot scores were high enough for a second-place overall finish.

“We improved,” Rohring said. “We went from almost last place at Sugar Creek to second place at the state championship.”

The world championship event is April 19-25 in Louisville, Ky., which means more time to tweak Silent Helper and the robots.

The team, which includes Peter Hoegy, Brandon Bullock, Avyay Vennam, Chiloh Church, Jackson Chamberlain and Christian Young, hasn’t yet presented their classmate with Silent Helper. They want to make it the best it can be first. There will be at least a half dozen prototypes on or erased off the drawing board before they get to Kentucky.

Early on it only converted text to print. They coded. Now it has audio. They’ve gone from “a whole bunch of jumbled up wires,” Shope said, to a version in a quarterback wristband to what they hope will be an app compatible, wearable, sleek final product.

“We’ve come a long way since then,” said team member Alayna Khoja.

While the team would love another great finish at the world championships, they may be more excited about finishing Silent Helper and presenting it to their classmate.

“In the end, it’s really something that could actually change the way people communicate around the world with special needs,” Rohring said.

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 12:54 PM with the headline "Tega Cay students helping classmate lands them in robotics world championship."