FREEDOM, Wis. (SPECTRUM NEWS) - Five middle school students from St. Nicholas Catholic School in Freedom recently gained recognition for their robotics team. They're known as Team 4082A.
While you may assume attending a small school would be a disadvantage in the robotics world, coaches Ron Wolf and Ed Krejcie would see it as an advantage.
”It’s probably easier, frankly to take a small, cohesive group. Class sizes are small. They all know each other’s personalities. It’s probably easier to work with that than it is a sort of big group,” said Wolf.
“It just happens that we have a group of students that each one of them is good at their individual task at a world class level,” said Krejcie.
The team took second place last year in the robotics world championship. Bill Ryno works with the Robotics Education Competition Foundation and is familiar with the team. He reacted when the announcement was made.
“I jumped up out of my seat. They were competing with the best teams in the world and they came in second place. I was so proud of them. Then to see them come back this year. Their team was probably even better this year than it was last year,” said Ryno.
The team went back to the drawing board in 2020. They were tasked to design, program, and build a robot that could sort and arrange colored cubes. It wsa an intensive commitment.
“The weeks before state there’s probably I would guess the students spend forty to sixty hours a week here fine tuning and practicing,” said Wolf.
The team won the Wisconsin state competition in February. Sara Krejcie is a programmer for Team 4082A.
“When we won and I knew that we would be able to make it to worlds and nationals and all that…I was just really excited and proud that we made it so far," said Sara Krejcie.
Unfortunately, the national and world competitions were cancelled due to Coronavirus.
“I think they actually had a very good chance of winning," said Ryno.
At the last moment however, the world championships decided to hold a competition after all, albeit virtually. Teams were randomly placed in brackets. An algorithm used data based on performance of the teams through out the season to determine the winner. Teams watched from home on a web stream as the results were unveiled. By virtue of Team 4082A's consistently high scores throughout the season, the algorithm determined they were the world champions.
“Even though we didn’t compete against the rest of the world, our scores still competed with the rest of the world. I think that’s even more rewarding, said Sara Krejcie.”
Eric Wolf, the team's driver watched from home with his family.
“I didn’t think we’d be able to do that good again but we just had better statistics," said Eric Wolf.
The team enjoyed the victory the best way they could while stuck in isolation.
“There wasn’t even a pizza party afterwords with all the kids because of the whole Covid restriction so it was kind of depressing from that sense,” said Ron Wolf.
The small team from Freedom hopes to return to a live championship next year. Specifications have already been issued for 2021 and the team has already started designing the new build.
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