TEAM 476 ROBOTICS
A LOOK INTO THE FRAMEWORK OF THE PONCA CITY HIGH SCHOOL ROBOTICS TEAM Story and Photos by Laina Smith/Staff Writer
Ponca City High School created its first robotics team in Nov. of 1999. Tanya Scott previously ran the program. Scott and a group of engineers from ConocoPhillips refinery volunteered time to the club. Conoco sponsored the team and still does to this day. In 2018, Ponca City High School’s physical science teacher Derek Taylor took over the club’s leadership. “I’ve always kind of been fascinated with physics,” Taylor said. “That’s my subject. That’s what I teach. So whenever they said they had an opening, Mr. Dilbeck, the high school principal at that time, walked me around and kind of explained a little bit about the program and I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to take it over.’” “In the beginning, they provided a workshop space,” Taylor said. “A massive workshop space on the plant and the students would meet there … They got together with the engineers from Conoco, and they competed in something called ‘FIRST Robotics.’ We have some of their legacy equipment still around. They were wildly successful. They built 150 lb. industrial-size robots. They were massive things using vertical mills to cut their own screw holes. They machined a lot of the parts themselves because they had engineering help. It’s pretty amazing to see some of the stuff that was left behind that they hadn’t cannibalized yet for future robots.”
“One of the things that we’ve migrated into doing is … It’s not really an erector set, but you can kind of see where people would think that way,” Taylor said. “They have to custom design the robots. They have to code them in a new software. They can be autonomous or manually controlled, and they’re smaller scale, so they’re easier to box up and carry with us to competitions.” Thanks to Phillips 66, formerly ConocoPhillips, the robotics team received new components for their robots a few years ago. Students learn and use many different jobs to create a robot from scratch in the robotics club. “We have programmers,” Taylor said. “Chase is our main programmer. He’s really taken ownership of that. Then we break out into builders and designers. Everyone has a say in the design. They break apart and look at a CAD drawing and build from that CAD file. They are becoming proficient in being able to use CAD software and being able to work with hand tools and build something from scratch that they designed.”
When making a robot come to life, there is a process the team has to follow to accomplish their goal. The students follow that process step by step while incorporating skills learned to create a robot ready for competition. “At the beginning of each season, VEX, that is the company that oversees the robotics world at this scale, and every April right after worlds they debut the next season’s challenge or game, as it’s referred to,” Taylor said. “You have the summer to be thinking and looking over how best to manipulate a robot to score points. When we meet back in August, we watch the game reveal to refresh that, and we spend the first couple meetings designing. So the first thing that has to happen is we have to have a design, so we’re not just down here cutting metal randomly.” Once opposition research and designing are complete, the design is added to the design software. Once the robot’s design is complete, the team then brings that to the workshop and builds the robot. “It takes months of hard work to get the robot actually built,” Taylor said. “Once we have all
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The Ponca City High School robotics club is composed of Po-Hi students who compete each year in multiple competitions leading up to the world championship. The team has many roles where students can showcase their knowledge and problem-solving skills. “These students build robots to compete in a variety of competitions throughout the year,” Taylor said. “They compete with students from Oklahoma, Texas, all over the world really if they qualify for the world championships. It’s held once a year in April.” Over the years, robotics has evolved into what it is now. As a result, there are fewer engineers involved in the club. It also means the team uses new software, and coding looks different.
Two Team 476 members are working on fixing a robot. The students are in the robotics lab in the Anderson Building at Ponca City High School.
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