Chaffee High School robotics team draws together students with variety of interests

CHAFFEE -- Since 2009, the robotics program at Chaffee High School has continued to grow under Jaron McMurry's leadership.

McMurry has worked at the school since 2004, teaching industrial arts. His classes vary from woodworking to graphic design to robotics.

After getting a grant from Southeast Missouri State University in 2009 to build its first team, the program, Chaffee Industrial Arts Robotics, has expanded to encompass four different teams.

"It was starting as an after-school program, but as more kids got involved, it started getting too big, so we started offering a class during the day," McMurry said. "Now it's during school and after school."

Three of the teams are called FIRST Tech Challenge -- or FTC -- teams, with smaller robots, but four years ago the teams combined to form an additional FIRST Robotics Challenge -- or FRC -- team formed, which is larger and more expensive.

McMurry said the cost for the FTC teams is usually $2,000 apiece, and FRC teams can cost closer to $10,000, but they always find a way to complete by tapping the school budget, community sponsorships and donations, grants, fundraisers and other forms of support.

Working on an FRC robot is about as advanced as a high school student can get in engineering, which is part of the reason so many students are attracted to the club.

"We've got a very wide mixture of kids on our teams, from the head cheerleader to basketball players to kids in band, kids who like art, or kids who don't do anything but this," McMurry said.

Hannah Seyer, a junior, is an example. She said she's been taking McMurry's classes since freshman year, took a robotics course last year, and this year decided to join the Chaffee Industrial Arts Robotics team.

In addition to building robots, Seyer is involved in cheerleading, basketball and her longtime passion: softball. She said getting involved in robotics has provided a whole new outlet for making more friends.

"Joining robotics helped me to meet new people that's in my school," Seyer said. "And there's a couple girls on my team who I never talked to before, but now that I know them, they're some of my closest friends -- just from joining robotics. It's really a big range of people who join."

Seyer is part of the team Girls With Attitude, which, at its most recent competition at St. Louis Community College-Meramec in St. Louis, brought home the highest award given at that competition, the Inspire Award.

At FTC competitions, four robots compete at a time with a particular challenge. This year robots had 2 1/2 minutes to knock loose a stick holding a container of plastic balls, then pick up the balls and place them in tubes of varying sizes.

FRC challenges are similar, but on a larger scale. McMurry is excited to see how all three teams work together on their FRC robot, which they have six weeks to complete before beginning competitions in March.

"I think they're actually going to come together pretty nicely. I think by the girls having their own team and doing so well, it really opened up the eyes to the boys that, 'Hey, these girls can do some awesome things, and if we work with them, we can do great things,'" he explained.

All three FTC teams have excelled recently, and they are all advancing to the Rolla Robotics Qualifier at Rolla High School on March 7 in Rolla, Missouri.

McMurry said countless weekend and after-school hours are put in to these robots, and even over Christmas break students requested coming back to school to rebuild a robot they weren't quite happy with.

"[I'm always surprised at] the amount of hard work these kids are willing to put into it. ... It's kind of surprising because it's hard to get kids to do anything anymore, but I really don't have to try that hard when it comes to this," he said. "For some reason, they all want to be a part of it and they just try super hard."

Seyer plans to continue her education in engineering once she graduates high school, and has started looking at schools in the area to gauge their programs.

"Before robotics and everything, I didn't know what I wanted to do," she said. "I thought I wanted to get into college, make sure I played softball, and now, surprisingly, I'm looking at all the engineering places first, then looking at the athletics programs, which is really weird for me," Seyer said.