Volume 30 No. 5
May 2014
Robotics team travels to world championship By Alyse Horn
Courtesy of Perry T.A. Perry High School had a school wide volunteer day on Friday, April 25. Students spruced up areas surrounding the school and cleared trash.
Arts Night to showcase student performances By Alyse Horn In its fourth consecutive year, Arts Night hosted by Urban Impact will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, May 16 at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church, 250 E. Ohio St. Tammy Glover, the director of performing arts at Urban Impact, said overall there are about 200 performers ranging in ages from first to 12th grades. The performances will consist of mostly Northside children who have been diligently fine tuning their talents to showcase it during Arts Night. Glover said there will be an elementary mime group and ballet performance, an improve act-
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ing group and various vocal and instrumental performances. One of the choir groups will be the Urban Impact Singers, which is a small traveling signing group supported by Urban Impact. The instructors who have helped the children throughout the year are Performing Arts Academy Director Eric Anderson, Vocal Music Coordinator Matthew Mason, Instrumental Coordinator Lorenze Jefferson and Choir Director Sheri Turnbull. This year will be the first performance from Urban Impact’s youth orchestra, which Glover said is made up of 10 children
In March, the Sarah Heinz House robotics team –Team SHARP – placed first in Pittsburgh’s FIRST Regional Robotics Competition, which catapulted the team to the FIRST Robotics World Championship in St. Louis, which concluded on April 25. FIRST stands for the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. According to its website, it “is a premier organization and recognized global leader in incident response.” Christine Nguyen, technology education and robotics director at Sarah Heinz House, said the team wasn’t sure what to expect in a worldwide competition, but they did extraordinarily well. Nguyen said there were 400 other groups competing on Team SHARP’s level, which are then split into four divisions of 100 teams. Overall, Sarah Heinz House finished 47th in its division and 10th in offensive points. The offensive points rating comes from the robotic challenge, where each team was asked to build a robot that is no more than 120 pounds and is less than five feet in height. Each team had six weeks, January and February, to
See Art, page 6
-First Annual Brew Fest 3 -Men’s shelter adopts dog 7 -MF Plant Parade 9
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build their machines. The robot must be able to play basketball and shoot the ball into a six foot basket. Although Sarah Heinz House competed in only two regional competitions, Nguyen said they happened every Saturday for six weeks and winning one competition would allow the winner to receive an invitation to the world championship. “From there [the championship] is just a bigger version of regionals, except you’re playing against the toughest robots in the world,” Nguyen said. Team SHARP, which stands for Sarah Heinz House Advanced Robotics Program, officially started in 2010 and Nguyen said during the first year of the program the kids could barely get their robots to move. After the first year the team adopted the motto, “just get a little better each year,” Nguyen said. “We knew we would do well this year, but we had no idea we would do this well,” Nguyen said. “[The team has] worked incredibly hard, we had to fight every step of the way, and they deserve this.” This year there were 19 participants on Team SHARP from seventh through 12th grade, and 17 team members were able to travel to the See Robotics, page 12
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