ATLANTA, Georgia — Three students from Meadowbrook High School in St Andrew were special guest participants at the Georgia Robotics Invitational Tournament and Showcase (GRITS) earlier this month and impressed competition organisers with their quick thinking.

The students, Shemoy and Garry Weller, and Adam Mollison, are in grades seven and nine. They were originally only scheduled to be observers at the competition, as per an invitation to the head of their science department, Rose Knight. However, the organisers invited them to compete as special guests and the team quickly designed, built, programmed, and tested their robot to go head-to-head on a special playing field with the other bots in the competition.

They completed the two assigned tasks on the second attempt.

Robotics coordinator of 100 Black Men of Atlanta Bart Sudderth was impressed.

“With students from Jamaica here we can proudly say our event is now international,” he quipped.

Guided by the theme ‘Deep Space’, students worked to solve a common problem – aiding work in space. Organised by the 100 Scholars Robotics Alliance, a project of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta organisation, the invitational was held at a 15,000-square-foot robotics lab at the Johnson Research & Development Company campus in downtown Atlanta on December 14 and 15.

Team chaperone T’Var Warburton said the competition “provided exposure and opportunity for students to interact between cultures and institutions and also opened students to possibilities including scholarships, enrolment in institutions overseas and future careers”.

She commended the Meadowbrook alumni in Jamaica, New York and Georgia for providing funds for travel, accommodation and for hosting the students.

GRITS is a FIRST Robotics Competition off-season tournament designed to showcase the best and brightest in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).

FIRST Robotics Competition, meanwhile, is an international high school robotics competition where teams of students and their coaches or mentors build 120-lb game-playing robots over a six-week period. According to the FIRST website, the robots take on various tasks, such as scoring balls into goals, flying discs into goals, inner tubes onto racks, hanging on bars, and balancing robots on balance beams.

Teams are given a standard set of parts, but are also allowed a budget and are encouraged to buy or make specialised parts. The FIRST Robotics Competition is one of four robotics competition programmes organised by FIRST, the other three being FIRST Lego League Jr, FIRST Lego League, and the FIRST Tech Challenge.

— Byron Henry