Bemidji Robojacs shine in and out of the arena at conference championships

BEMIDJI — Senior Matthew Bernard isn’t hard to spot at a robotics event.

Most of Bemidji High School’s robotics team, the RoboJacks, wear red and black checkered flannel as their team uniform.

But Bernard’s flannel is littered with pins representing the various events and opponents the Robojacks have competed against and competed against in recent years.

There is a CyberBears icon. There’s one from Boston Scientific. There’s a button with a picture of the green and yellow North Dakota State bison from a robotics competition at the university. There is a button for Bemidji United Robotics, a new chapter recently created by the RoboJacks.

The tradition isn’t unique to Bernard—the team has been collecting pins and buttons for a while—but it’s something he’s worn with pride since his second year on the team.

“Whoever is crazy enough to wear it — this year that person is Matthew,” Robojacks coach Kirk Anderson said. “It became something of a trademark. There are people who know Robojacks are here because they can hear the button-down shirt coming.”

At Friday’s Northern Minnesota Conference Robotics Championships at Bemidji High School, Bernard didn’t have a single button attached to his shirt. Most of the event’s participants were local schools who had encountered Robojacks before. But Bernard still deserved an individual award.

NMRC named Bernard Team Member of the Year.

Every year in early January, FIRST Robotics releases a game guide, kicking off the robotics season, which will last until spring.

The guide introduces teams to a new game and rules, giving robotics programs across the country the opportunity to create a new robot for the year’s competition.

“I got into robotics because I like working with my hands,” senior Sam Maus said. “I love designing and making things, and it was really cool to go from January when you start building and designing to March when you have a completed robot and are ready to compete.”

Friday’s NMRC Championship at BHS was a friendly competition, an off-season event for Northern Minnesota teams competing in the 2024 Crescendo Game.

“This is another event we can do in the off-season so we stay active and update our robots,” Bernard said. “Maintain them, improve them, learn new skills.”

Crescendo has a red team and a blue team, each consisting of three different robotics teams. The robots are placed in the arena, collecting yellow foam rings and placing them in a variety of different boxes and airlocks.

The game is played in several rounds with different team compositions in the qualifying rounds. By the end of the qualifiers, teams are ranked based on wins and certain in-game performance.

The top four robotics teams then automatically become alliance leaders and select the other two groups to team up to compete in the championship rounds.

Robojacks, nicknamed “Jack,” put in an impressive showing at Friday’s events, finishing with a 5-2 record and a No. 9 ranking after qualifying rounds.

“Teams are often looking for a well-rounded robot,” Bernard said. “We are looking for a way to score the most points in the most efficient and consistent manner. And that’s usually what we build.”

Jack scored particularly well on the “dynamic” – one of the highest gates that requires a robot to shoot a foom ring into the hole on Friday.

“What you need is a robot that gets the job done,” Anderson said. “Today I look at our robot: it’s not the fastest and it’s not the most accurate, but it gets the job done. It’s consistent and it shows.”

Despite performing so well and finishing in the top 10 in the qualifying rounds, the Robojacks were not one of the teams selected to compete in the championship.

Friday’s competition wasn’t just about results in the arena. The NMRC Contribution Award was another important feature of the event and was presented to the team judged to have had the greatest impact on the local community.

At one point in the event, each team gave a presentation to the judges about what they had done for their community. The Robojacks had a lot to say.

“One of the things we identified (as a team value) was impact or service to the community,” Anderson said. “Technical skills are great, but if you can’t use them to make the world a better place, what’s the point?”

BHS members attended events around Bemidji to spread the word about robotics by giving presentations to elementary schools and participating in fairs and parades.

Often the focus of these presentations is on the skills and qualities gained from robotics, both technical and less tangible.

“(We talked about) how robotics helped us in high school and how it will help us later,” junior Quinn Burrow said. “Mostly it helps me develop the skills I’ll need in my job – I’m not sure what I want to do, but it helps me.”

“You always think about technical skills, design, manufacturing, programming; but what you find (when) you go into business are soft skills,” Anderson said. “Can you hold a conversation with someone, can you be the kind of teammate that someone wants to be with, whether it’s a robotics team or a manufacturing firm? And if you have an idea, can you communicate it?”

In addition to community outreach, the Robojacks have continued the strong tradition of Bemidji High School Unified Sports with the recent creation of the Unified Robotics department.

The combined group gets together and builds Lego robots, starting the season in late September in preparation for the regional championship in November.

Although the Robojacks were not awarded an NMRC contribution award, receiving a plaque was unlikely to have been the team’s public outreach goal.

“It really comes down to helping kids learn to be the kind of people who give back to society,” Anderson said. “We realized that in our school we value inclusion of students of all abilities. Robotics is the way to do that, so we embraced it.”