CVHS Robotic Students Compete at JPL

Crescenta Valley High School students joined inventors from 26 other middle and high schools in a competition that required weeks of preparation for a sixty second contest.

The Invention Challenge was established nine years ago as a challenging yet friendly competition open to students from middle and high schools, JPL employees and contractors and their family members. There is a different engineering challenge every year. This year participants were told to create a mechanical devise that would launch 20 tennis balls into a metal trash can located five meters (a little over five yards) away from their device in less than a minute. To add to the challenge, the device had to be capable of using 20 tennis balls of varying age, mass and appearance and it had to be started through a single operation such as cutting a string or flipping a switch.

In addition to a total of 27 schools, six JPL teams competed.

The CVHS team worked longer on the design of the mechanism than the actually building.

"It took us about 10 hours to build," said Ara Kourchian, of the CVHS team.

The team got six tennis balls into the metal can within sixty seconds.

"We are really proud of what we did," Kourchian said.

Teacher and robotics mentor, Greg Neat, said that the competition was good for the students and helps prepare them for the future FIRST competition. That contest pits schools from all over the southwest in a predetermined robotic game design.

"We will know what the game is around the first of the year," Neat said.

In past years the robots were required to play games similar to basketball or volley ball. At CVHS the robot not only gets to compete in FIRST but also plays a role at the graduation ceremony and at several other functions throughout the year.

Neat and Win Saw are the mentors for the program. The team this year will say goodbye to many seniors that have been with them since their freshman year.

The program is lucky that so many freshmen and sophomores are part of the team, Neat said, as they can be trained by the outgoing seniors.