Washington 4-H announces robotics program

Washington County 4-H, best known for its myriad livestock and agriculture-related experience for young Washington County residents, has announced a robotics program starting next month titled “EagleBots.“

“People think of the traditional 4-H to have agriculture themes, I would say that’s where 4-H started a hundred years ago,” Iowa State University Extension Youth Coordinator Amy Green said. “With so much technology, kids are just surrounded by it and love it, and a lot of the things we have in Washington County are driven by youth interest.”

While this will be the program’s first full year under 4-H, Robotics EagleBots Mentor Jim Pitcher said the program started at Kirkwood.

“We started in 2018 as a Kirkwood club,” he said. “Kirkwood demanded that our students be members of Kirkwood, and many of my team members where not, they were in junior high, so we transitioned to Washington County 4-H, and that’s how we came about.”

Pitcher said the program had ties to Washington County 4-H’s conventional agricultural focus.

“Iowa State University is trying to promote technology, and that technology actually bleeds strongly over into agriculture,” he said. “There is a need to understand the technology that’s out there. Some of those John Deere tractors out in the fields don’t have anybody in them, they’re operating on their own, they’re autonomous.”

The team’s activity is balanced to teach members well-rounded skills. Pitcher said engineering was just one aspect of the program.

“We operate as an engineering project,” he said. “We have to finance ourselves, so we have a business manager who oversees the operation … We do fundraising, and the community supports us in our engineering project, and then we have our builders. These kids have to understand physics, that if you’re lifting a quarter-pound block, that’s stress on a motor.”

Every year, robotics leagues across the country hold competitions, where teams bring robots to compete in any number of task-based games, some of which change every year. Of the 12 annual competitions in the EagleBots’ league, Pitcher said the group attended four every year.

These tournaments are more than good engineering experience. Pitcher said they were designed to give students genuine collaborative experiences, founded on an idea league members call gracious professionalism.

“If a battery goes dead and we don’t have a spare battery, it’s not unusual to go to another team and get a spare battery from them,” he said. “We’re not a high school team competing in football, we’re teams that are cooperating and competing together to show off what our robot can do.”