Northland Robotics Teams Gather for Season Kickoff

It was a big moment of anticipation for the students as they've been waiting for months to hear what tasks they'll have to design their robots to complete and what materials they'll have to build them with. 

Kirsi Kuutti is an alumna and now mentor for the Duluth East robotics team and said she still remembered feeling the anticipation for the big reveal. 

"Seeing what that game is, that moment of realizing what on earth you're going to be working on is just terrifying and exciting at the same time," Kuutti said. 

The announcement launches the teams into a six-week build season. They'll work almost around the clock creating a robot to compete in this year's game. 

"We're just really happy to get going, because we've spent nine months since we were last competing and getting a new robot is going to be fun," Karl Frisk, a senior on the East team said."

Every team is different, but the East team sets up a rigorous work schedule from day one. 

"Today is our biggest day, we'll probably be working until around 9 p.m.," junior and East captain Anna Karas said. "By the end of the day, we kind of like having a rough outline of what our robot is going to look like."

Every minute until regional competition in February counts. The East team, 40 students and about 12 volunteer mentors, plans to work every almost four hours after school each day on top of 8-hour shifts every Saturday and Sunday.

"We meet like 24/7 it feels like," Karas said."It's a lot of work"

With all the competition materials in hand, the team broke up into six, small departments Saturday afternoon to begin preliminary planning. 

"We need to read through the game rules, we have to know those by heart, like the back of our hand. Then we strategize. We say 'okay how do we want to play the game? What does our robot need to do to accomplish the task?' Then of course, we've got to bag it up after six weeks, so we've only got a little time to build," Karas said. 

All the work is leading to competition and beyond. Students said the competition is a crash course is skills colleges, scholarship committees and employers are looking for. 

"It teaches teamwork; it teaches engineering skills; it teaches you accounting; it teaches you management. It teaches you what you need to know to succeed when you go out in the world," Frisk said. 

Kuutti said her robotics experience sparked her interest in a double major in electrical engineering and computer science at UMD.

"I wasn't gung-ho for engineering right away, not at all, or really anything about robotics, I came on the team, my friends were joining," Kuutti said. "This robotics team has definitely changed my life."

Her time on the East team also landed her an internship at NASA the summer after her high school graduation where she created a circuit board. 

"Something that I built right out of high school is going to be in space in just a couple of years, the deep space habitat. It's going to be attached to Orion spacecraft that you saw go up just a few weeks ago."

At least four other high schools have fielded teams for the competition this year. 

Duluth will host a regional in February where teams will compete for one of six spots to worlds later in the year.