It’s a weekday afternoon in the Bucksport High School gymnasium. On one side of the vast room, students are playing basketball.
On the other, a wheeled, light-up robot named Tide whizzes around a makeshift arena on the gymnasium’s stage. It’s moving so fast it creates a breeze as it places tubes on a tree made of plastic pipes and dunks large dodgeballs into a pretend net.
Students on the school’s robotics team handled the design, building and coding necessary to make Tide go, and their work was so skillful that they have now qualified for a worldwide championship — marking the eighth time in nine years that the school has made it to the event.
Bucksport has far fewer resources than many of the top competitors in the world of high school robotics, where a new challenge is provided each year and students create a robot that’s up to the task. They share building space with the school’s woodshop and practice on the stage in the gymnasium, about half the size of a competition field, surrounded by racks of costumes.
But the program has consistently made it to the top level of competition out of 3,690 teams around the world. Closer to home, it has helped students prepare for careers and develop life skills.
“We’re just funded out of a little woodshop here in Bucksport, Maine,” teacher John Boynton said. “We still made it.”
On Wednesday, they’ll be in Houston to test their skills on the world stage at a competition organized by FIRST Robotics, a nonprofit that coordinates events for students to grow their interest in STEM topics.
The competition runs April 17-19 and will feature three other Maine teams, from Messalonskee High School/Somerset Career and Technical Center, South Portland High School and Brewer Community School.
The team from Bucksport — known as Team #6329, or “The Bucks’ Wrath” — is currently ranked 17th in the world, behind competitors with millions of dollars in backing, including some from Silicon Valley, private and state-funded engineering high schools and others supported by Apple, NASA and the government of Israel, according to Boynton. Bucksport’s team, in contrast, is almost constantly fundraising and in some past years has qualified for worlds but been unable to go because it couldn’t afford it.
“This isn’t a level playing field,” he said, comparing it to the high school’s basketball team playing an opponent that had trained with the Celtics in their NBA facility.
Boynton can’t say for sure how the team has managed to succeed year after year despite that competitive disadvantage — it almost seems magical, he said — but he credits the students for their dedication.
Bucksport is also unique because the team’s work time is built into the school’s engineering program. That allows students to develop their robot weeks before other teams and spend more time practicing with and fine-tuning it. Throughout the season, they’ll adjust the code and add new tricks to score more points in competitions.
Izzy McSharry, a sophomore who’s “driving” the robot this season, said the students weren’t expecting much because a number of strong members graduated last year.
Now that they have made it to worlds, the students are just focused on practicing and getting as far as they can, she said. Along with the technical work, they’re learning how to stay calm at competitions and not let the pressure of expectations get to them.
They’re getting some help with that from a number of recent graduates who return as mentors, such as Hannah Barnum, a business student at Husson University.
As a student, she became the team’s data collector and learned she had a mind for business, leading her to study it. Like others on the team, she joined in the footsteps of an older sibling. Barnum’s helping out now to give other students experiences similar to hers, which she said opens new horizons and sets them up for success.
“We are a good team, but part of it is luck,” she said.
Still, she thinks it’s amazing that the students can work together to create a machine that’s ranked within the top 20.
The program also helps develop “soft skills,” according to mentors and students, including working as a team, focusing under pressure and public speaking.
Mike Gross, a teacher who founded the program with Boynton, said he’s seen it attracting kids from outside the district. Its graduates have gone onto engineering college programs or the working world with experience they wouldn’t have otherwise.
“We’ve got what the kids want,” he said in the woodshop last Thursday as students packed up supplies they’d need in Houston.
A sophomore and a junior both said they found out that they liked engineering and wanted to focus on it because of robotics. They were excited about going to worlds, but it was nothing new — they’d already made it there before.
