March 28, 2024

Drivetrain: Iowa Speedway celebrates STEM during final 2016 race weekend

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Brandon Van Baale of Sully catches a gray rubber ball launched by a robot doing 360 spins on the concourse Saturday at Iowa Speedway. The 7-year-old rolls the ball back to the small machine which grasps and loads it back into an on-board launcher.

At a nearby booth, Story County-area high school students Evan Williams, Joel Neppel, Jacob Preston, Jason Park, Preston Witte, Rebekah Stammer and Rucha Kelkar control the robots movement and launcher with an HP laptop, two fighter jet-style joysticks and a retrofitted Xbox 360 controller.

Team Neutrino’s robotics concourse demonstration above Turn 1 was one of many exhibits on display before Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series US Cellular 250, promoting STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — fields and initiatives.

Team Neutrino competes in FIRST Robotics — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. FIRST is an international mentor-based program founded in 1989 to inspire young people to pursue education and career opportunities in science and engineering.

Team Neutrino has been competing in the annual FIRST Robotics Competition for five years. The team has about 40 members all from Story County. Each year in the first week of January, FIRST releases a new game with challenges for Team Neutrino’s robot to overcome. The students have six weeks to design, build and program the robot.

This year’s competition was “FIRST Stronghold.” Each alliance — or grouping of teams from the regional qualifying event — decide on a set of obstacles to keep the opposing alliance’s robot from shooting a ball from the robot launcher into the goal.

Team Neutrino competed at the Minnesota North Star Regional Robotics Competition in 2015 and again in April. This year, Team Neutrino lost in the semi-final round by 1 point.

The Story County high school students work with mentors from Iowa State University’s computer and mechanical engineering departments to problem solve and learn about the engineering field.

Team Neutrino has access to the facilities at ISU’s Boyd Lab to build their robot. All of the design and most of the machine work on aluminum tubing is completed by the high school students, with a few laser cut pieces donated.

The students are also responsible all the fundraising and marketing to support the robot and participate in the FIRST challenge. Team Neutrino co-captain Rucha Kelkar, a senior at Ames High School, said at Iowa Speedway the students have a $30,000 budget for travel to the competition, website design and for parts to build the actual robot. Some of the sponsors include John Deere, 3M and Monsanto. A part of 4-H, Team Neutrino has learned to sell their potential as future engineers to investors.

“A lot of our sponsors are year-to-year now, so we just have to maintain relationships with them,” Kelkar said. “But then we also apply for a lot of grants every year.”

The robot itself can cost up to $4,000 to manufacture and Team Neutrino made two.

“We have a practice one,” said Williams, team captain from Ballard High School. “After your six weeks are up you have to put the robot in a box and you’re not allowed to touch it any more. So we built a second robot to continue developing the attachments and fine-tuning before competition.”

Down the concourse from the robot, another skilled trade was showing off a high-tech demo. Cleveland-based Lincoln Electric let race fans try their hand in a virtual reality welding trainer used by trade schools and community colleges nationwide.

Company representative Jeff Graham said the aim of the Iowa Speedway demonstrations was not recruitment but a fun way to expose people to a skilled trade which is in high demand.

“It teaches people how to hold their welding torches properly without twisting or rolling their wrists and keep the proper angles as they travel down the joint,” he said. “We have it set up to do wire welding and stick welding right now.”

For more advanced techniques, Graham said their are devices on the market which can simulate pipe, overhead welding and a variety of environments.

As an entertainment medium highly dependent on skilled tradesmen and women and engineers, highlighting STEM initiatives and programs is a natural fit for Iowa Speedway and NASCAR. In a press statement, a speedway spokesperson said track officials also understand the importance of STEM to the State of Iowa.

Back at their robotics booth, Team Neutrino’s mentor Taylor Tuel — a senior mechanical engineering student at ISU — sacrificed the power mirrors in his car to replace the blown fuses which caused the robot to go unresponsive.

Tuel helps provide the Team Neutrino students with mechanical knowledge and support. The students do roughly 80 percent of the computer aided drafting for the robot independently before Tuel and another engineering mentor steps in to double check the specifications. It’s as exciting for Tuel to watch the robotics’s team come together as it is for the members of Team Neutrino.

“I didn’t have anything like this in high school. That’s why I really want to help because this is just amazing to me seeing it come together,.” Tuel said. “That whole robot was built and designed in six weeks.”

Contact Mike Mendenhall at mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com