Ferndale Middle School robotics team takes on world competition

FERNDALE — After winning a state championship at the end of last year, Ferndale Middle School’s robotics team flew to Texas this month to compete in the world championships.

The school’s team, Giggle Pickles, was one of 256 teams invited to the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship, which took place April 16-19 in Houston.

In a robotics competition, teams are challenged to construct a robot and use it to accomplish a list of set tasks. For worlds, teams were split into four divisions of 64 teams. Giggle Pickles competed in the Ochoa Division.

This was the first year Urban Peterhans, 12, participated on the robotics team. The sixth grader said he was nervous to compete in worlds, but he was excited when he got to the competition.

Peterhans’ initial expectations were that the team might finish over the 50% mark, or higher than 32, in their division. In the end, Giggle Pickles finished 14th with a 7-3 record in the qualifying round.

Peterhans said it was cool how high the team ultimately finished.

“We didn’t get picked, but it was cool being in the top because I’ve never been that high in something before,” he said.

Nick Kokotovich, Giggle Pickles’ head coach, said the top eight teams in each division make it to playoffs and get to pick which team they want to be in an alliance with. Unfortunately, Giggle Pickles was not selected.

“The kids were a little disappointed … but they learned a lot and had fun and we thought we did pretty well,” he said.

Kokotovich stated that most of the other teams they competed against were from high schools, which certainly made the competition more challenging, but also more rewarding that the kids were able to get 14th against the high school teams

“The team did really well,” he said. “I was wondering how they would handle not only going up against teams that had better robots and everything, but the team has to go discuss with their alliance partner how they want to play the match, who’s going to do what parts, etc. And so I was wondering how that would go when they had to go talk to kids who are older than them and or had more experience and how they would handle that. And they handled that great.”

The fourth-year head coach felt his team surpassed any expectations he and the other coaches had for worlds and how well the students would do.

This especially was the case as the team looked to build a new robot after they won the Michigan FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship-Southeast in December. Kokotovich said the team might have been burnt out as they finished the robot the week before Worlds.

“The kids were spending way more time than they expected up to this trying to finish that, meeting almost every day of the week,” he said. “I was worried they were a little burned out, but they were able to go down there and focus again and did really well.”