Four students from Waiakea Intermediate School will be the only team representing the Big Island in May at the VEX Robotics World Championships in Dallas.
Seven out of the 66 teams representing Hawaii that faced off at the VEX State Championships in February made it to the Dallas competition, with the rest of the state’s representatives being high school-aged students from Oahu and Molokai.
Team 38501A — eighth-graders Connor Bellman, 14; Ryan Tanouye, 14; Case Shiroma, 14, and Jaxon Shimazu, 13, all of Hilo — has been working since before last summer toward the goal of making it to the final showdown, which approximately 20,000 VEX Robotics teams in 45 countries compete to reach.
The students have been diligently working on their progress for roughly 10 hours per week after school with their coach, Jon Kitagawa, who has been teaching STEM and computer science and literacy to the sixth through eighth grades at Waiakea Intermediate, along with coaching robotics for about 10 years.
“They still surprise me with what they can make, because it starts out … (with) a lot of interesting ideas, and it’s nice to see them work towards that over time,” Kitagawa said. “They’re really ambitious with their their choices and … really driven to actually accomplish that.”
This is the second time this particular group of robotics enthusiasts have qualified for the VEX World Championships, having previously made it to the competition’s highest stage at the junior level of VEX IQ when they were in sixth grade during the 2022-23 school year. The plastic robots built at the VEX IQ level engaged in less interactive and complex games than the metal robots at the higher VEX V5 level for which they’ve qualified this year.
Waiakea Intermediate is the only school where V5 is available to middle-schoolers, whereas at other schools, middle school students would still be at the IQ level, Kitagawa and the team explained. This interaction outside of their comfort zone opened the doors to whole new levels of understanding and skill for the team.
“Throughout the season, these kids are actually competing against and with high school teams, and learning from them to make their robot better,” Kitagawa said.
“We learned a lot about strategy and how to develop strategies as an alliance,” Shimazu added, alluding to the fact that teams are paired with partner teams for the V5 level competitions.
“I’d say it gave us a lot of good ideas over the years for designing and engineering,” Tanouye chimed in about working with high schoolers while they were still in seventh and eighth grades.
“The game changes every year, and the objectives for each challenge changes, so they learn the skills, but they have to design new robots of every year … it’s always a new experience,” Kitagawa said. “The program always encourages learning from each other and growth when teams collaborate … to develop new strategies and different ideas, but they also want … to make kids think more and problem solve.”
The robot the students are taking to May’s contest, known amongst VEX competitors as Worlds, doesn’t really have a name, but the boys said it could be called Titan 5.0 to represent Waiakea Intermediate’s mascot and the fact that it is the fifth iteration of the students’ agreed-upon design.
The robot, which will be shipped to Dallas whole, needed to fit the physical dimensions and the engineering capabilities dictated by the game that was revealed last spring. This gave students time to begin generating ideas and also recreate the playing field where they will be competing alongside a partner team.
For this year’s challenge, the robot needs to pick up a stake and carry it while picking up plastic rings to stack on the stake at a high rate of speed, and the robot is programmed to be able to identify if the collected ring is the correct color for its team or, if not, to launch it away using pneumatic technology.
There are two timed rounds in which the robot will compete, one in which the players are driving the robot using a controller similar to those used for video games, and another round in which the robot acts autonomously based on coding entered by the students.
The team’s previous robot, which could be called Titan 4.0, did not perform too well playing the same game at the State Championships in February, the boys said, adding that the shortcomings of the predecessor illuminated areas for improvements to Titan 5.0. They ultimately qualified for Worlds by winning the annual VEX Design Award, which is the same way they qualified for Worlds at the junior VEX IQ level.
Whether they win or lose in May, the boys alreadyare enjoying the best prize of all: the tight-knit friendship that designing and building a robot can foster between teammates. They communicate often through a group text the team maintains, and when they’re not perfecting their automaton, the boys can be found together fishing, going to the beach, or playing Pokemon Go.
The boys all trace their passion for construction and design back to early days of childhood Lego building, and all found their interest in engineering and robotics in the fifth or sixth grades through after-school robotics offerings and summer programs from Waiakea schools.
The boys each plan to apply the skills gained through this extracurricular activity to different careers they are considering. Tanouye will continue enhancing his engineering skills as a professional engineer, while Bellman wants to use the problem solving and documentation he’s become good at through robotics in his future as a lawyer or pilot.
Similarly, Shiroma feels like he’s already learning skills that support his dreams of becoming a flight mechanic or pilot, just as Shimazu feels his skills behind programming the robots will serve his future as a software engineer or computer scientist.
The boys currently are raising funds for the journey to Dallas, utilizing a GoFundMe page overseen by their parents. Though they’ve only raised a fraction of the $10,000 needed for the trip, the boys are more focused on perfecting the coding needs that will get their robot through the autonomous round of the game.
The boys’ fundraising page can be found by visiting GoFundMe.com and searching “Team 38501A”.
“Even though we made a lot of mistakes (on our way to Worlds), we were able to persevere and actually made it to the big stage where all of the teams aspired to go,” said Shimazu. “We’re just very proud to represent our own island, and as the only team to be representing our own island.”
Email Kyveli Diener at kdiener@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
