KAILUA-KONA — Justin Brown is engineering a dynasty.
Rock stars, astronauts, tech industry leaders, top universities and the President of the United States will all descend on St. Louis later this month for the FIRST Robotics World Championship Competition.
Joining them will be the Tiki Techs, Kealakehe High School’s award-winning robotics team, which is led by Brown, the school’s career and technical education program coordinator.
Brown’s program was one of 500 to begin competing in FIRST in 2011, a competition in which thousands of teams worldwide partake. It is the only program of those 500 to earn entry into the World Championship Competition all six years since its inception.
“We’re one of the youngest programs in the state and one of the most awarded,” Brown said.
The Tiki Techs pulled double duty in 2016, competing in regional qualifying events both in Florida and in Hawaii, earning the right to represent their school at the international competition twice over.
Most recently, they placed second in the Hawaii Regional Robotics Competition. It was held Friday and Saturday at the University of Hawaii Stan Sheriff Center in Manoa and featured 38 teams from around the world, including squads from the United States, Australia, China, Japan and Taiwan.
This year’s event was billed as FIRST Stronghold, featuring a medieval theme. The Tiki Techs were sent an animated video displaying the 27-by-54-foot course their robot would have to navigate, including all 10 defense systems their opponents would be able to use to slow down the machine Brown and his students would have only six weeks to build.
The robot the Tiki Techs constructed needed to be capable of navigating every defense, which included crossing moats and opening a portcullis. The robot also needed to be capable of intaking boulders and firing them into opponents’ towers. All of these accomplishments, as well as scaling the opposing tower itself, resulted in points by which the games were scored.
Competitors are part of three-team alliances, selected randomly, that work together in qualifying rounds. After qualifying, the top eight teams are seeded. Those teams then go through two rounds of selections to build alliances for a single-elimination playoff.
‘Chaos’ and competition
Six mentors and 22 students from Kealakehe traveled to Manoa. They were split into a drive team, a pit crew, a programming team, an informational outreach team, a media team and a scouting team to monitor opponents.
Mentor Mike Hauck, technology coordinator at Kealakehe Intermediate School, described the atmosphere during the games as “controlled chaos.”
Ian Denzer, a junior and member of the drive and programming teams, said being in the heart of the action is similar to participating in a sporting event, adding that the culture of pressurized problem solving Brown implements throughout the year comes in handy when unpredictable situations arise.
“Things break all the time,” Denzer said. “In Florida, our intake system broke and (while walking) in a line on the way to a match, we disassembled the robot, made adjustments and put it back together.”
Only first-place teams win automatic bids to the World Championships, held at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis April 27-30.
The Kealakehe team fell two points shy of victory in Manoa but was already qualified after winning the Engineering Inspiration Award in Florida. That award is handed out to teams judged to have advanced respect and appreciation for engineering not only in their schools, but also their communities.
In Manoa, the Tiki Techs took their achievements one step further by capturing the Chairman’s Award, billed by FIRST on its website as the competition’s highest honor.
Brown said the Chairman’s Award, the second of its kind won by the Tiki Techs in the past six years and another way to qualify for the World Championships, is all about the culture of a program — trying to change the landscape of educational robotics and foster a program other schools should hope to emulate.
“We have this audacious, tenacious attitude about what problem we’ll solve, then go solve it,” said Brown, who was personally honored at the Hawaii Regionals with the Woodie Flowers Award, given to the most outstanding mentor. “It’s kind of like cross training. We are trying to get them to learn how to learn skills. In that crucible of pressure, do you know how to step up effectively, or do you just crash?”
Creating a culture
That cool under pressure culture is embodied by one of the program’s leaders, senior Courtney Nelson, who will graduate high school this spring one year ahead of schedule. Nelson said the robotics program has changed her fundamentally as a person.
“It’s just that hunger you never knew you had for purpose, for meaning, for being reliable, responsible and kind of taking charge,” Nelson said. “In pressurized situations you learn to adapt, to be creative and different. It applies to all sectors of my life. It has really changed me.”
It is that feeling — at least in part — that has inspired Nelson and her peers to dedicate so much of their free time to the program. Brown said the approximately 60 students who spend some or all of the year as part of one of his program’s 26 various STEM competitions put in more than 5,000 collective hours annually.
Students like Nelson average about 30 hours per week in the U Building, the on-campus site at Kealakehe now entirely dedicated to the Tiki Techs and their pursuits in engineering. Six years ago, when Brown and his then small team of techs built their first robot, they did so outdoors on a small bench.
“Students are here five days a week during the six-week (robot) building period,” Nelson said of the roughly 30 students who play some role in the FIRST competition. “This was one of our lightest seasons. I only spent the night here working four or five times.”
Several students work on multiple teams leading up to and during the competition. All the real-world skills she is honing as a part of Brown’s budding Tiki Tech dynasty have led Nelson to consider her mentor’s program her true education.
“I tend to feel like when I’m not here, I’m wasting my time,” Nelson said.
Because the Tiki Techs won the Chairman’s Award in Manoa, the team will compete for the International Chairman’s Award in St. Louis. If the program can nab that honor, it will qualify for the World Championships in perpetuity and reach a significant benchmark in a long and prosperous journey that began in 2011 on a bench at Kealakehe High School.
More important to Brown, though, is the confidence and fearlessness his students take with them when they graduate.
“When kids walk away with that attitude, I don’t care what they’re going to do,” Brown said. “They’re going to be badasses.”