MARQUETTE, Mich. (WZMQ) – An award-winning high school robotics team from Marquette held a demonstration today to bring awareness to robotics and all the career opportunities available in this exciting field.
These are the Binary Crows, a robotics team based in Marquette. The team is comprised of high school students as well as eighth graders and home school kids. According to Team mentor Sarah Hagel, the skills they gain transcend in engineering,
“Obviously, a lot of STEM skills they’re learning, engineering, mathematics, a lot of design, and coding. But then there are also things that you wouldn’t necessarily think of. They’re practicing business skills, they’re writing presentations. They’re talking to judges and answering questions,” explained Hagle.
The skills these students are learning are immediately transferable to their career goals.
“But there are a lot of different aspects, like managing our social media pages or fundraising, or finding all sorts of logistical things as well,” said team member Boyne Gregg.
The Binary Crows are a small team, but that lends itself to being a very tight group.
“When I’m going to school and I’m in my classes and all that, there aren’t always people that share the same interests as me, so being able to congregate here, there’s a lot of people that kind of have the same ideas about life and what they what they want to do,” said Gregg.
Arriving at the World Competition took a lot of hard work and dedication.
“There were a lot of long hours, a lot of late nights. We oftentimes, well, officially, we only met like five days a week, most of the time, though, we were in here seven days a week,” said team member Elijah Schneider.
Tuesday’s demonstration was all about spreading awareness about robotics
“The point of today is to get some other kids in here and get them behind the controls to really give them that bug and get them hooked on the idea of robotics,” said Hagle.
The Binary Crows were one of three teams to compete in the World Championship. The others were from Gladstone and Calumet. Marquette’s Binary Crows placed in the top 10% out of 600 teams.
