BotsIQ competition in Hempfield puts STEM concepts into action

Southmoreland High School senior Josef Jefferson has learned quite a bit during his time with the school’s BotsIQ team, building robots that battle in a competition among Western Pennsylvania schools.

“We came up with some new ideas, and we saw a lot of bots last year that were really effective,” Jefferson said. “We were able to implement some of those ideas.”

Jefferson and his teammates put those ideas into action at Westmore­land County Community College’s Hempfield campus on Thursday with their robot, Shake’n’Bake. It was the second of three preliminary competitions that will determine seeding at the BotsIQ finals, set for April 28-29 at the PennWest California campus.

Student teams spend months designing, engineering and testing their robots, and putting hours of work into what will ultimately be a handful of three-minute competitions.

More importantly, the teams’ work touches on all of the letters in the STEM acronym and serves as a way to promote careers in skilled trades and manufacturing.

“Three of us have done tours of manufacturing companies,” said Southmoreland team member Robert Slate. “They’ve told us all about how these jobs don’t require a college degree and you can still earn six figures a year.”

“I really like the manufacturing part of it,” said Southmoreland junior Logan Boyce. “I think there’s a lot more people my age now talking about (jobs in the skilled trades).”

That’s certainly what parent and Plum High School team adviser Bob Miller hopes to see.

“It’s great for the kids because they can see the difference between engineering something and actually building it,” Miller said. “Everything takes forever, so making a small change can mean stripping the whole robot down, and you have to account for that type of thing.”

The Plum team began work on its robots, R.A.M. and Orion, in October. And while the team is self-funded, it recently received quite a boost from two alumni, Don and Joe Doerfler. The brothers, who were BotsIQ competitors in high school, now work in manufacturing in the region and are featured in the Netflix “Battle Bots” show.

The Doerfler brothers recently earned the chance to donate $250,000 to STEM charities of their choice after winning the Norwalk Havoc Robot Combat competition in Connecticut. They opted to donate more than $60,000 to the Plum team and $70,000 to the BotsIQ competition.

“We have some amazing alumni who’ve really stepped up,” Miller said.

In fact, Southwestern Pennsylvania BotsIQ Executive Director Michel Conklin announced Thursday that the Doerflers’ generosity was part of $400,000 in donations that BotsIQ received, much of which will go toward establishing a training and education center in 2024.

Miller and Conklin said a push to introduce students to skilled trades and manufacturing is having a positive effect on the annual robot battles.

“We’ve definitely seen more kids coming in at a younger age and spending four years with their club,” Conklin said. “The knowledge that kids are getting through the program is something that they may not even fully understand yet.”

Miller said something as simple as touring a manufacturing facility can make a big impression.

“The tour we took at Hamill really opened their eyes,” he said. “Seeing a $2 million mill, and the engineering and computer coding that goes into it, was a really great experience.”

Nathaniel Broadus is a workforce specialist with Catalyst Connection, a Pittsburgh nonprofit that provides consulting and training to small manufacturers in the region. He said the work getting students interested in skilled trades starts at the elementary level.

“There’s studies out there saying that if you want to get a child involved with STEM, it needs to happen by the time they’re in seventh grade,” he said. “Doing that work in fourth, fifth, sixth grade is really setting the table for them to be successful in those later years.”

Miller said that philosophy is borne out in competitions such as BotsIQ.

“To get into a career like engineering, something like this can really help you with it,” he said.

Following a third round of preliminary competition, set for March 15 at Robert Morris University in Moon, teams will be seeded and placed into a bracket for the finals.

For details, visit BotsIQpa.org.