 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters, and today we're going to learn about the VEX Robotics Tournament. What happened there in the 2024 VEX Robotics Tournament from VEX Robotics Engineer. In fact, Engineer at SOWEST, HIGP, we're going to learn about those things, and the Sea Grant College at UH Minoa from Adria Fung, who is in fact a robotics engineer. Welcome to the show, Adria. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for having me today. So what does VEX stand for? VEX actually doesn't stand for anything. The VEX Robotics Competition is a competition organized by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation. So there are organizations that manages and organizes all the teams and all the competitions across the globe, and our position here in Hawaii is really to just help to manage and support the local groundwork and ground efforts supporting the competitions and the teams here. Yeah, you've been doing it for a while, so you've seen the delta factor, the dynamic, and how it's changed. How has the competition changed over the past few years? Oh man, I think when, so I was a student when VEX Robotics kind of just started up. I was at high school participating in the VEX Robotics Competition, and our robots were pretty basic and pretty small. I mean, a lot of us didn't exactly know what we were doing, so we were pretty much learning from each other and all, but I've seen that as the years go on and the kids are getting smarter and smarter and being more knowledgeable of how to integrate robotic systems, mechanisms, computer science, and coding into it. I mean, the robots are getting much more complex. Even at the elementary level, the robots are pretty big for their age. Well, I mean, it's really interesting and it's fun for sure. It's the intersection of science and technology and toys. There, sorry. No, it is pretty much like one. Yeah, the kids enjoy it, so. So, you know, last time I initially saw robotics working at the university and I'd date myself was College of Engineering Holmes Hall, but you're not in Holmes Hall. You're in Southwest and HIGP and Sea Grant. What is, what are those organizations and what's their interest in robotics? Yeah, so I work in an organization called the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium, so we're actually under the HIGP department. Pretty much was started up to help give students in the undergrad levels an opportunity to do a lot of these NASA funded projects. So a lot of the focus for us here is actually on satellite work. We have rocketry going on in some of the community colleges. One of our affiliates, Guam Space Grant is actually doing drone, a drone program out there. So the interest is really in more of the NASA related research and studies here. And so I work in the K-12 area where we're pretty much helping to push the pipeline of students that eventually decide to come into UH or enroll at one of the UH campuses and give them that opportunity to continue their STEM learning at the higher levels. How is it doing? Are you having more kids, less kids, are the kids more Akamai about the technology of robotics or what? I mean, we would like to grow a huge crop of robotics engineers just like you, but query is that happening? Oh, I definitely think it's happening. I mean, we're trying to promote the fact that we have a lot of high tech careers in Hawaii. So kids don't exactly have to go away to college or go away to the mainland for these types of careers. They can come back and stay home. They can do a lot of the work in satellite, like I said, or rocketry, or even just managing the telescopes or, you know, the local groundwork of how do we integrate technology with agriculture or community problems here. And I think it's really about innovation in Hawaii. So as I see it, and I'm a neophyte about this, I'll always be a neophyte about it. I'll never catch up with what's going on. But there's three things we ought to talk about. One is the design thinking aspect, you know, what problem do you want to solve with the robotics? And the second one is the hardware and the materials science. And I guess I would say the wiring, I know that's very sophisticated. And then of course, then there's the software that lives electronically within that device. So can you talk about those three things? Let's talk about what problems, you know, you want to solve, what functionality you want to achieve in the competition with robotics. Yeah, so in the Beck's robotic competition, the program releases a new game every single year. Towards the end of the school year, after the World Championship ends, they release a brand new game. And that's when students can kind of go on and figure out, okay, what exactly is the game that we have and what is it that we have to solve? Build a robot to play this game for this upcoming school year. So the game is released around early summertime, and the teams either, you know, if they're really those overachieving teams, they can start in the summertime or a lot of the schools wait until they're beginning up the school year to begin. And then really the kids are starting with the engineering design process. It's looking at how do we identify what the game challenge is, what exactly it is that we have to design our robot for, look on the internet, do a lot of research to figure out what exactly is our criteria and our sub-problems. So it's really helping the kid kind of be computational thinkers. So thinking like a computer scientist or thinking like an engineer is dividing those sub-problems out and figuring out, okay, do we have to toss the ball in? Do we have to do a hanging mechanism at the very end of it to get more point and kind of figure things out in that aspect? So what's the game this year? What was the game this year, the competition? Yeah, so the game this year is actually taking these things called tri-balls. They are a strangely shaped ball. They're kind of like triangular shape, kind of like the shape of my head. And they just roll around really interestingly on the field. So the teams will actually have to figure out how to manipulate these balls, either by grabbing it or intaking it and then scoring it underneath a goal zone. And then there's other obstacles on the field like a PVC pipe that the robots will either traverse over or they have to go underneath this hanging bar in order to get over to their goal side. And a pretty much the objective of the game is to score these balls into the goal zone. And at the very end of the game, there is a hanging end game bonus. Well, that sounds hard because you have to know the physical, the kinetic characteristics of this object, whether it be the funny ball or the rolling pipe or whatever it might be. How do you determine, how do these kids determine the kinetic characteristics, the way the thing moves? I think a lot of it is actually through testing. A lot of the schools have a field in their classrooms or their robotics lab. And pretty much what they're doing is really prototyping different kinds of dry bases, different kinds of mechanisms, and just testing it and collecting data on it and figuring out what is our best prototype or our best mechanism that we can use for the competition. And that's how they pretty much iterate and go through the engineering design process to design their robot. You know, if I was a videographer and PSI am a videographer, I would say, why don't we take this funny looking ball and take some video of it and see the way it moves and measure the moves as they are recorded on the video and put that into metrics. Do you do that? I think the capabilities of the VEX robotic system are still at the basic setting various cool levels. So I don't think we're at that point yet. But if we do have possibly university or professional organization team, oh, I'm for sure they'll take that type of data and be able to manipulate that ball. Okay, so now these kids come in and they're part of the competition. Oh, I wonder is that, you know, in March or April, they have the science fair. They're the same kids who developed these robots and these teams also, you know, demonstrate their work in the science fair. I think some of the students actually do. They actually entered the science and engineering fair. I'm not sure that they use specific this specific kind of robotics for robotics competition, per se, but some kids might use the actual VEX robotics parts or the system behind it, the hardware, the electronics and possibly do an engineering project with it. So a lot of the students actually cross over to different kinds of them programs within their school. So they not only do robotics, they might do like you mentioned science engineering fair or even future farmers or the first robotics competition. Sure, it all crosses over trying to make technology work for us. Well, so let's go back to the parts now. Okay, I remember that the parts will come from the mainland from organizations which make parts and you open up a catalog and there's lots and lots and lots of parts in there. And somebody's manufacturing them and the job of the editor, if you will, is to identify the parts that he or she needs in order to achieve the physical robot. Am I right about that? Pretty much all the parts come from the VEX robotics system. So what kind of parts do you buy? I mean, what I'm thinking is that if you're going to compete, you are going to have the best physical device you can have. You want it to be smart, fast, strong, all that. So do those factors enter into the selection of the parts? Pretty much, yeah. I mean, the VEX robotic system is really, it was really designed as a easy entry point for a lot of the schools and organizations to get into robotics. So they try to make the parts as simple and as easy to learn as possible. We're not talking about custom 3D printed parts or laser cut waterjet types of parts. That's for, you know, a different kind of competition, but this is more for that intro level robotic kind of students. So the parts that they would buy would be things like aluminum or steel sea channels or chassis. There's screws, nut bolts that they had to pick up. And then in order to make things move, they have to pick up things like motors, the brain, the controller that interfaces everything all together, possibly sensors, gears, chains, rockets, everything to pretty much make the robot move. So if you break down all of those parts into its own individual components, the kids will learn pretty much the functionality of each part. And then it's really cool to see the students be able to figure out, okay, if we use this part exactly how it was designed to be, and not just using putting a bunch of wheels at the end as counterweight, but actually designing it with, you know, a center of gravity in mind for the robot. I think you'll see that the robot is going to be much more structurally sound when it comes to going into competition. So it's really neat to be able to see the kids kind of design and think in that way to think and design first without just going into the building of it. How much help do they need? How much teaching do they need? How much, you know, counseling and advice and consultation do they need as they go down, you know, the development trail here? And how is all of that different from K to 12? Yeah, so we have a committee called the Hawaii State Bex Planning Committee and it's made up of volunteers. It's also made up of event partners, people who host the tournament, current coaches, retired coaches like myself. And we pretty much help to support the local community by providing things like workshops, grant opportunities, resources even. So we really like to be able to work directly with the coaches and directly with the teams to kind of give them that foundation. I mean, the Vector Robotics competition, a lot of the teams kind of use after school time to figure out their robots and design it. And so we completely understand the teacher's busy schedule. I mean, working with a lot of the elementary and middle school teachers too, they're just, they're play dishes so swamped with all the work that they have to do through the school day that, you know, we really want to be able to at least help give them that support after school so that way the kids are, they feel confident with that kind of knowledge going into competition. They feel much more confident talking with other teams and also the judges too. Well, you know, we talk about confidence by recollection of the science fair, science and engineering fair is the biggest takeaway on that is that kids can get to explain what they've done. And this is a tremendous benefit from the science fair because otherwise they might be shy and they, you know, they wouldn't be able to tell the third person what they've done. Is there a time in the development of the robotics devices where these kids can explain what they've done? Definitely, it's definitely built into the competition. A lot of the teams actually go and do multiple competitions throughout the school year, not just the one, you know, presentation or competition. A lot of them actually do two or three competitions throughout the school year. So it gives the kids the chance to go through the engineering design process multiple times to refine and design their robot. They have to talk it out within their team members to figure out who's doing what. So that's where communication and teamwork comes into play. Plus also they have to do another aspect at the competition, which is the judging and engineering notebook portion. So the kids are documenting in their engineering notebook what they've done, how they design their robot. They turn that into the judges at the beginning of the competition. And then the judges, after reviewing their notebooks, go out and actually go and ask the kids these questions. So you definitely see the kids build their confidence level and their speaking and communication levels throughout the school year. And it's amazing to see what, you know, they come up with at the very end at the state championships. Let's talk about the teams, how big are the teams and where the teams do together? And, you know, what kind of exchange do the teams have intrinsically and intrinsically with other teams? Yes. So this year we have a little over 250 teams in Hawaii from elementary all the way through high school. The ones that participated in this recent VEX Robotics competition, they were at the middle school, high school level. So we had a total of 28 high school and 16 middle school teams that qualified to the championship. So the teams are made up of roughly, I would say three to four members, three to four students of their team. A lot of them are, you know, have been doing robotics for the last couple of years. We have a lot of brand new teams, brand new freshmen that come in that, you know, have no idea what they're doing. But it's really neat to see that the network that they have within their school first. So for example, we have a few schools that have, say, a freshman only team and then a veteran team. And it's really neat to be able to talk with, say, the freshman team and hear of the impact that the veteran students have towards the freshmen. So being able to give them the kind of knowledge that they need. So that way, when the seniors leave, the freshmen who will now go into their sophomore year can continue this robotics program. And it's also really neat to see the team collaboration throughout the different kinds of schools. So these teams are seeing each of all these other teams almost every other weekend throughout the school year, especially at the high school level. To the point where all of the team members pretty much know all the other team members of a different school on another team. So they're actually collaborating and, you know, like going on various forums, community types of social media, and just collaborating with each other and figuring out what is the best kind of strategy. Teamwork, how do we figure out this if they have, if one team has a specific problem, then they can go to another team and they were having this coding issue. Can you help us out with this? So it's really neat to see, especially during the championships where there's not really a separation of the team. I mean, it is still a competition and it's very competitive. But, you know, we saw one team, a middle school team where they actually yelled out to their opponent on the other side and they said, hey, you have a really cool robot right there. Awesome job. So for a middle schooler to actually say that to their opponent. I mean, those middle schoolers are, they're in a really great foundation right now. Oh yeah, that was really terrific to be involved. So talk about being involved, you know, you mentioned a couple of things. One is coaches and judges, and you mentioned grants. And those are all, you know, third party participations. So what is it like to be a coach? Maybe all the coaches just like you or maybe they come from outside and the judges, are they science and technology people? And finally, if I feel that I want to help this project, can I be a grand tour? Would you look to organizations in the community for money? Yeah, I think it's definitely taken a huge village to pretty much put this program together. It really starts with the teachers at the schools that are willing to be coaches for their students because they see this really neat opportunity for their kids to be engaged in this robotics platform. And then so from the schools and from the students and the coaches, you know, a lot of the schools do have really great support from their administration. For the coaches that want to do more for their community, they can be something they can take on a role called an event partner, meaning that they host one of the tournaments that the teams will come to and, you know, try to get qualification to the championship level. It's really the event partners responsibility to find community members, reach out to volunteers in their community, in their parent organizations from their schools to be able to put a competition together. So you're looking at people not only as judges, so judges are made up of science, engineering people, but also community members, teachers, even folks from the DOE complex offices as well. But we also have other volunteer roles such as refereeing, emceeing, and so those are a lot of them are just made up of community members that this event partner has built together as part of their network. And then it's also part of the coaches or event partners responsibility if they want to find sponsors for their own program. So especially for the high school level, a lot of them do travel outside of Hawaii. Some of them travel to the neighbor islands for competition, but a lot of them do travel to say the world championships or even internationally like to competitions in Japan. So a lot of the coaches really try to put in that kind of work to find sponsors and find grants to be able to support their program. So I mean, we give a lot of, a lot of, you know, Pat on the back to the coaches, I've been a coach myself, so I totally understand. From our point at here at Hawaii Space Grant, we really try to support the education side. So really just the foundation knowledge so that way the coaches can, you know, put on that kind of time or devote their time to, to supporting their programs in other ways. Well, the competition itself takes place at local schools, right? I know this is not outside, this is inside the school, and the school provides a space and, you know, organizational assistance, I expect. Can you, can you talk about how the competition works and how it worked this year? You know, there are various grades, of course, and are they separate competitions? And of course, I want to ask you who won. I need to know who won and why they won. Yeah, sure. So the VEX Robotics competition, there are two levels. So one is called the VEX IQ competition. That's for elementary and middle school level. They use plastic parts to build their robot. The VEX IQ championships will actually be later on overpresenting weekend at Avamokai Middle School. It's open to the public, so families in the community can come and attend. The middle school, high school level is called the VEX Robotics competition, and those are the teams that use the metal part. They have to use screws and nuts in order to, like, secure their robots. The competitions start around the September-October time frame, and in this year ended at late January. And so what we just had was the VEX Robotics regional championships. So this is the culminating event for the middle school, high school level competition, where the teams that qualified from the local qualifying event schools make it to the regional championships. And so at the regional championships, we awarded four slots from the high school and three slots from the middle school to the world championships in Dallas, Texas, which is going to be held in late April. So the teams that won at the high school level were two teams from St. Louis School, the Milani NEXT team, which is a home organization team, and also non-accruly high and intermediate school that are going to the world championships. And then at the middle school level, it was the two Wailua teams from Wailua High Intermediate School, and then we also had Waini Intermediate School. So the teams that won, or won the slots to the world championships, part of it was the performance side. So they were the tournament champions of the entire event. After the teams go through their qualifying matches throughout the day, they actually have to do an alliance selection. So they go through an alliance selection to figure out who they want as their alliance partner, and then they go into pretty much a quarter-finals, semi-finals, and then the final round of competition. So we have the performance aspect of it, and then the excellence award, which is the highest award a team can receive at the VEX Robotics Competition, that celebrates the teams' dedication to their engineering notebook, to the design process, their communication, teamwork skills, and also partially performance side as well. The winners of the excellence award were also awarded a slot to the world championship too. Wow. Yeah. So if you get into the world championship and even win it, possibly, then you get a prize of a million, billion. Do they give you money? What happens to you? I guess somebody flies these kids to Dallas. But after that, are they guaranteed to have a scholarship at some important engineering school or what? What are the benefits? So I think the benefits of going to the VEX Robotics Championships, I mean, I took my teams there for two years, and it's such a huge event. There's over 3,000 teams in this one arena that, you know, you get to see all these teams from all different kinds of countries come to this one place to compete in the same game that you've been playing since the beginning of the school year. So the teams that end up going and end up, you know, winning in their division and all, they get to go into the final rounds in this dome area where it's kind of like a party in a sense. There's confetti, there's like dim lights, strolling lights and all. And so the teams that win it, I don't think get any kind of money, but they do get bragging rights from their school. They might possibly get what I think the teams are really after is a ticket to the next year's world championship. So that way they don't exactly have to go through the same process all over again. But the teams, I mean, go through this engineering design process so much that they're just experts in their robot. So to be able to communicate and network with other teams from other kinds of countries, it's really valuable for the kids. And there are a lot of scholarships too that are open for high school students to apply. And they make friends and the friends a long term, right? Yeah, pretty much. I made friends from Japan, from Korea, Kazakhstan when my team went to the world championship, and we still keep in touch too. So really this network is huge. You know, one thing I've noticed is that when you see a kid really put his heart and soul or her heart and soul into a project, a competition like this, a team like this. It's that temporary. It defines that kid all the way through K to 12 and beyond. And, you know, in college and graduate school, what have you, and in career. Am I right? Is that what happens here? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, we've been tracking a lot of the students since they were doing robotics since fourth grade even. And to see the kinds of careers that some of them are going into, whether it being an avionics engineer at the White Space Flight Lab, or being an engineer at Hawaiian Airlines, managing projects at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab in NASA. I mean, it's huge. The impact is huge. And I can definitely testify as I was a student too in robotics that it's had a huge impact on me and it's neat to be able to still keep in contact with people who are in robotics as well. Well, we mentioned, you know, the different elements of how you build a robotics device. And I'll refresh my own thinking about it. You know, one is the design. Two is the hardware. And three is the electronics. And I guess somewhere in there is software. And I remember watching some kids put robotics devices together and they were on computers designing software. And now it's just me now. Just me. I always think that software is what really drives that when you get down to the fine point of a competition and see how the device operates and how it handles, you know, differential conditional circumstances. It's the software that wins the game. Am I right? I think it's both. Definitely a good balance of software. When I was doing my robotics engineering schooling in college, we were taught that robotics is made up of three likes of engineering. So the first like is mechanical engineering. Second like is electrical engineering. And the third like is computer science. So, you know, you cannot just develop software for a robot if you don't exactly have a built robot to begin with. But the software is what makes the robot think or move or do what it's supposed to do. So definitely the three likes come into play all together when it comes to designing designing a robot. So the question is what language are they learning for this is standardized language? Are there libraries of functions they can, you know, take from? And what kind of consultation and poaching do they need? Do they get in terms of developing software? Because some of these kids, you know, they might be good at computer games or social media on their phones, but they have no clue about software. And you have to teach them about software right down to the lines of code. That's a learning curve, if I may. How does that work? I think it really just starts with the foundation elementary levels. At the elementary level, the kids are programming with something that looks like scratch coding. So block based, they're just dragging, dragging, dropping the blocks from the window into their actual code itself. So telling the robot, all right, drive forward, turn left, go forward, turn right kind of thing. So very basic, very basic level of coding at that point. But the kids are starting to understand the algorithm behind it. So from block coding, in the Vectrobotic platform, they're able to either go into Python, which is text based, or even a more, you know, C or C++ as well. So both Python, C and C++ are professional coding languages. And so the kids would, you know, once they start to understand the basics of coding and algorithms and the foundation of computer science, then they can start to build their code and text over time. And there's so many different kinds of resources that they can tap into. I mean, just talking with other students when we go to the competition, a lot of them are showing them different kinds of functions that they've used for their robot, or they can go online and ask a question in the Vectrobotics forum and get an answer that way as well. So there's so many different kinds of resources for kids to tap into and really the coaches are there to just kind of help the kids through the, with the foundation knowledge of computer science first. I like to teach the coaches and also the students about flowcharts of how to start planning your program and all. But really after that, the kids, they're so smart, they're so resourceful too that, you know, they can even go on like social media and ask a question of coding and they might get an answer right then and there. So everything is right at their, right in their fingertips. Yeah, they might get somebody to tell them something that you can't. So, you know, the thing about software is that once you get into say, C++, you know, you have, you know, broken a barrier. Now you understand what it looks like and what it can do and what kind of functions are available to you, the power, if you will, of the language. And so once you've done that, you've entered into a new world of thinking. You know, coding is a new world of thinking and once you break into it, you know, then you can go, what do they say, to the moon. It can do anything once you understand how it works. So I think this is a tremendous benefit for any kid who's involved in this activity, this tournament, this competition. So, Adria, where is it all going? You know, nothing stays the same. Everything changes. We know that's an engineering principle, if you don't mind. And where is it, you've seen it long enough, you've been involved in it up to your eyeballs long enough to know where the whole thing is going. Can you give us a handle on what you expect over the next, say, five years? Yeah, so, I mean, what I like to always educate teachers and coaches and robotics is that robotics is really just the vehicle where we can help, you know, help the kids apply things that they're learning in their classrooms like math, English, social studies, even into robotics. But really, it's having the students learn about the foundations of robotics. So, for example, what is this kind of hardware doing and how is it interfacing with the software, along with sensor integration and all. And it's really getting the kids to understand this kind of pattern of hardware, you know, software electronics integrated into it, where we want to be able to encourage students to be creative, right? So, like, in Hawaii, I think innovation is going to be the next big field where the students have having this kind of knowledge in them helps them to figure out exactly, you know, how they can put this all together to solve a local community problem. And so we know that the problems are always changing, but we still have field that robotics can definitely play a part in such as health care, agriculture, community problems, cleanup, you know, pollution. There's so many different kinds of avenues, but I think what's most important is having the students understand this kind of basic engineering knowledge first, and then being able to apply it in different kinds of scenarios. So, I mean, like you said, like, we don't exactly know what's going to happen in the next five years, but if the kids are equipped with this kind of knowledge and foundation and tools, then they can solve any kind of problem that they're being thrown at them, just like the competition and the game. Isn't that the truth? I'm remembering a demonstration of a robotic boat that a team under Margo, Margo was the, she was the dean of SOS for a while, I don't know if you know her, she's an extraordinary woman and scientist. And she supervised the development of a boat that would move around the harbor here in Hawaii and sense with using a combination of sensors and was all automated. I mean, it's just completely automated. And it would check out what was in the water, whether there was any dangerous material in the water, any kind of, you know, problem that could result in damage to the harbor. And this was from Hawaii, and they wound up selling this boat to various other cities that, you know, needed that kind of functionality in the harbor. So you'll let your mind fly. And I am hoping that part of the dynamic we're talking about is that the games that are being, you know, assigned to these competitions will be broader and wider and deeper and more creative to start with. And I hope that happens. Do you hope that happens? I definitely hope so. I think the competition games are a good start, but it's really neat to be able to see the student combine what they have and at being able to solve a local community problem that really impacts their community in Hawaii. I think that's going to be the biggest, the biggest thing for the kids to take away from this. Well, thank you, Adrian. It's great to talk to you. You're really a great guest on these shows, and I certainly appreciate you participating with me and telling us how all of this works. It makes me want to go back to school again and sign up for the robotic program. Sure. We can have a think-tank Hawaii team participate in our next competition. Yeah, there you go. Adrian, any of the robotics program at UH Manoa. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.