Pueblo Community College Southwest sent two robotics teams to the Colorado Space Grant Consortium’s Robotics Challenge on April 13, and both teams won awards.
According to PCC’s STEM Academic and Career Expert Melissa Watters, the team of Matthew Troyer and Jonathan Nez won the Outstanding Demonstration of Advanced Autonomy certificate for their rover Marvin the Martian, while Carter Tanner, Leo Morey, Graham Messinger and Ben Carpenter’s robot Sandy Britches was given the Sojourner award for exemplary effort for a team new to robotics.
“Their six-wheeled rover was able to successfully complete all of the courses at the challenge,” Watters said.
Watters shared that the challenge was created to “provide hands-on experiences to develop engineering and science skills using the excitement of NASA.” The competition took place at the Great Sand Dunes National Park near Alamosa.
Watters helped guide and mentor the two teams, and she said they spent the 2023-2024 semesters designing and building their autonomous rovers to participate in the challenge.
“The challenge consists of six courses with obstacles of increasing difficulty. The rovers were programmed to avoid obstacles and navigate to the end of each course,” Watters said.
The team that created Marvin the Martian, Nez and Troyer, are college students at PCC, while the team who created Sandy Britches – Tanner, Morey, Messinger and Carpenter – are concurrently enrolled students from Montezuma-Cortez and Dolores high schools.
“The evaluators from CU Boulder were very impressed with the rover's design and programming,” Watters said of Marvin the Martian.
Multiple schools competed at the event, including Front Range, Arapahoe, School of Mines, Colorado State University and Colorado Mesa University.
Watters said it was PCC’s first time participating in the event, and they were thrilled to walk away with awards.
“It was really cool, and we were so excited about it,” Watters said. “It was a really cool accomplishment for these students here. We don’t have the resources that some of those big four-year schools have, and we were able to hold our own in that challenge and they had a lot of fun. They want to come back again next year, and they’re recruiting other students to participate.”
Enrollment is now open for students who wish to participate next year, and students have to be registered in at least one PCC class to take part in the robotics course.
“It doesn’t matter which class it is,” Watters said. “That’s the only requirement. I would love anyone who’s interested in participating to be part of it. You don’t have to be an engineer, you don’t have to know what you’re doing to start. That’s the best way to learn.”
