November 21, 2018
By: Bill Conger
The DeKalb West School Junior Beta Club won second place in the Robotics competition at the Tennessee Junior Beta Convention. As a result, they have been invited to compete at the National Junior Beta Club Convention in Oklahoma next summer. On the DWS Robotics team were Isaac Brown, Bralin Moss, Alex Antoniak, Brayden Carter, Xavier Parker, John Ellis, Aniston Farler, and Matt Nokes.
“The group of students working with robotics worked really hard to prepare for the competition,” says DWS Jr. Beta Club Lead Sponsor Jessica Antoniak.
Antoniak says a mix-up with the order for the LEGO Mindstorms robot order delayed work on the project until three short weeks before the competition.
“As soon as the set arrived, they built a basic robot, so they could learn how to program it,” Antoniak explains. “They brainstormed ideas to represent the convention theme: Reduce, Reuse, and Refine. The students working on programming modified the basic robot to make it work for their idea. Simultaneously, the props team started working on ideas to help with their interpretation of the challenge.”
“As the programming team worked on the original plans, they decided the idea as well as the robot needed to be completely revised. They started over from scratch with only two days before competition and worked down to the last minute.”
Thirty-one students along with parents and sponsors attended the convention November 18-20 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville.
D-W-S students competing in the Performing Arts were Tess Barton, Blair Gipe, Alyssa Crook, Madison Martin, Brooklyn Sutherland, Brynn Harvey, Ally Tarpley, Kayleigh Overstreet, and Ella Hendrixson. Parent Mary Puckett coordinated the event along with Maranda White, DWS 4th grade student teacher.
“I’m no Josh Isaac,” Puckett humbly says, referring to the talented award-winning coordinator for the DMS Performance Group. “He’s pretty special, but I do have rhythm, creativity, vision, and some dance experience so I just took what I knew and came up with a step routine. I hadn’t stepped at all since college when I first learned about it from attending a step show at Duke University, but I loved the art form from the minute I saw it years ago.”
“Getting all those steps down after hundreds and hundreds of attempts was tough. They did it though! Having never been on the Beta convention stage created some issues for us with our spacing, but we learned so much that will improve our performance next year.”
“Our performance went awesome despite a few mistakes,” says Puckett. “For most of the girls, this was their first time in front of a big audience. They brought tears to my eyes to see their energy up there. We were surprised to hear so many people say how much they truly enjoyed it and how they thought we made an impressive showing. Our routine was certainly different than any of the other groups in our category, and we learned from all those groups other elements we might want to incorporate for next year.”
“We really liked our routine and the type of dance we were doing,” says Jr. Beta member Tess Barton. “Everyone had to concentrate hard to not forget their lines. We hoped so much that the judges liked us, but we were also feeding off the energy of being in front of an audience and on a big stage, so it was a total adrenaline rush.”
Brett Walker, Matt Nokes, Kayleigh Overstreet, Jackson Vantrease, and Ella Hendrixson made up the Engineering team.
“We were given a list of supplies to bring for a tower to build with no real direction or specifications until the competition started,” Antoniak explained. “Our group built their tower with craft sticks, straws, aluminum foil, and card stock. Their tower successfully held a tennis ball.”
Kolton Slager, Cameron Bailey, Lane Goss, and Riley Fuson were in the Technology competition. Ally Tarpley, Bonnie Hale, and Maressa Rose created the Service Learning Showcase project. Gabby Wheatley entered Two Dimensional Design, Madison Tarpley put pencil for paper for Creative Writing as did Trey Beilfuss (BILE-Foos). Also competing were Marshall Farler in Woodworking, Aly Griffith in Visual Arts Photography, Blair Gipe-Visual Arts Jewelry, Karson Smallwood-Social Studies, and Alex Antoniak-Math.
The D-W-S Junior Beta Club will be working out details for the trip to the national convention June 15-18 in Oklahoma City.