The Rise of The Icosahedrons
Walking into a basketball gym, you’d expect to hear sneakers squeak on hardwood floors and basketballs clank on iron rims, smell perspiring athletes and freshly painted lines, and see glowing scoreboards and eager fans.
If you wandered into the NC A&T State University gym in Greensboro on February 20, you would have been met with different sensory experiences. You’d have heard clicking and whirring and seen young adults frantically typing at keyboards. You’d have seen the bleachers pushed back to maximize floor space, upon which several 12x12 “arenas” were constructed. Teams of students—many dressed in matching shirts—clustered around the perimeter of the arenas, focused intently on the activity within. An air of determination permeated the gym as robots, not basketballs, took center stage.
This was the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Hybrid State Championship, where our very own EWS Robotics Team competed.
Named The Icosahedrons, the EWS Robotics Team has come a long way in a short amount of time. In 2019, before the pandemic began, EWS saw the emergence of an informal robotics club. Their first project was the automation of the high school bell, cleverly crafted by Emerson’s artist-in-residence and volunteer blacksmith, Mark Eichinger-Wiese, and purchased and generously donated by the Carson Monroe Family.
If you visit the high school campus, you can see the bell—it’s a wondrous piece of ingenuity that combines technical savvy with natural resources. The club programmed a solar-powered computer to open a valve that releases rainwater accrued on the roof of the new building. The rainwater, which resides in a tank until called upon, travels through an underground tube that surfaces a few feet from the ground into a metal bucket. As the bucket fills with rainwater, it grows heavier and induces a well-positioned log to swing forward—battering-ram style—into large, metal gongs. Thus, the bell peals.
The amount of strategy, foresight, and problem-solving necessary for such a creation is worth appreciating.
While the programming side of things is a crucial aspect to the success of any robotics venture, students also had to play meteorologist and consider North Carolina’s capricious weather patterns. So as not to be reliant on such fickle things as precipitation, the students implemented a backup system that funnels water through a separate, underground hose attached to the main faucet from the Brown Wing.
Led by students Nico Martinez and Hudson Kortus and faculty sponsor Gareth Dicker, the Robotics Club slowly grew in legitimacy and ambition. According to Hudson, the team captain, the club kicked around the idea of doing competition over the last three years but never manifested it until this past fall, when Hudson set his sights on entering the FTC.
In September of 2021, as they do every year, FTC released the constraints to the games, and The Icosahedrons set to work. The team met after school every Tuesday and Thursday for an hour and a half. Their goal was to design, build, and code two robots to navigate an arena, collect balls and cubes, and transport them to a final destination.
The Icosahedrons placed 15th out of 25 teams at Regionals, good enough to book a spot at States. And thus, on February 20, our own Robotics Team found themselves in a gym in Greensboro, competing against many of the best student engineers in North Carolina. Less than three years since its inception and already competing in the state games is a testament to the resolve and hard work of the students, the oversight and mentorship of Gareth Dicker, and the financial support of many parents and Tune Therapeutics, a biotech company that sponsored the team this year.
Both Hudson—who will be a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute next fall—and Gareth are excited for the future of The Icosahedrons. They hope to see the team grow into something resembling a school sport—gaining new members each year and generating school pride at competitions and showcase events.
- written by Kaylen Alexis, class of 2015