Twenty-one members of Ferradermis, Whitewater High School’s FIRST Robotics Competition Team, participated in the TWIST off-season event held at Muskego High School on Saturday, October 12. The mission of TWIST (Together Women in STEM Thrive), hosted by Team 6421 The WarriorBots from Muskego, is to create an off-season event with a twist, centered around creating an empowering and inclusive environment for girls, a group typically underrepresented in STEM fields, to take their skills to the next level. The one rule modification for the event is that the drive team must be entirely female; male team members otherwise fully participate. The second annual TWIST event hosted 30 teams and 27 robots from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota.
The event also included a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Scrimmage, providing an opportunity for FLL teams who have already started their new season, to meet with judges to learn about the judging process and get feedback on their in-progress Innovation Projects. Full competition tables with referees were also available for students to test their robot runs and receive feedback. The Washington Bricklayers FLL Team, under the mentorship of Chris Nate and Val Troxel, embraced this opportunity to test their season progress so far. The Washington team, along with Whitewater FLL teams from Lincoln, Lakeview, and the Middle School will be competing with 20 other teams from around the state at the Whitewater FLL Regional hosted by Ferradermis at Whitewater High School on Sunday, December 8.
At TWIST, each team may nominate one student for the Student Inspiration Award Presented by CrunchLabs and Milwaukee Tool. Ferradermis was proud to nominate Senior Mechanical-CAD subteam lead Zoe Olson. Her nomination essay, submitted by Head Coach Mark Zimmermann and Advisor Laura Masbruch, included the following summary of Zoe’s contributions to the team: “Zoe Olson has shown amazing growth in both her leadership skills and her technical skills over her four years on Ferradermis. When Zoe joined the team as a freshman, she was not sure she wanted to travel with the team and really hung back at meetings. As a senior, she is still a very soft-spoken young woman, but her determination to push herself out of her comfort zone to master CAD and get comfortable with large-scale shop equipment has set a great tone for other girls on our team. Zoe has taken on the role of CAD subteam lead for the last two years. She has a true drive to learn and understand mechanical concepts. When not operating the lathe or the CNC router in the shop, she will often sit and have quiet debates with our technical team lead about mechanical design. Zoe is very welcoming of all students and will often sit with our newest members, exposing them to CAD and sharing her passion. Zoe tackles any job that needs to be done, whether that be repairing the robot or scouting in the stands. As a senior, she has enrolled in the Introduction to Engineering Design course as well as Digital Electronics and is now considering pursing a biomedical engineering degree at MSOE.”
The Ferradermis robot, Chief Lee the Tangerine, was led onto the field by Drive Coach Emerson Dunham, Driver Margaret Brown, Operator Erison Dreksler, Human Player Vivian Harris, and Technician Nina Heim. Ferradermis membership is currently over 60% female, so the team had no issues fulfilling the all-female drive team requirement. Other teams, however, would have been unable to field a drive team with enough girls to compete. For the second year in a row, Ferradermis loaned out girls to other teams so they would have a full drive team. Zoe Olson had agreed ahead of time to fulfill the role of human player for Team 8531 the TermiKnightors from Dominican High School. On the spur of the moment, two Ferradermis freshmen, attending their first ever robotics competition, also stepped up to help out other teams. Charlotte Trautman filled in as the human player for Team 1259 Paradigm Shift from Pewaukee, and Emilie Bruns stepped in as the human player for Team 1675 UPS from Milwaukee. The role of the human player is to feed game pieces into the field at the appropriate moment and to control the coopertition and amplification buttons, which change the scoring during a match.
The Ferradermis robot went 6-5 on the day and was invited to be part of the 6th seeded playoff alliance by Team 930 from Mukwonago. The pair then invited Team 6381 Red Raider Robotics from Sheboygan North to round out the alliance. Ferradermis was represented on the field for alliance selections by Isabella Cohen and Georgia Esch. The alliance pushed their way through the double-elimination playoff bracket, finishing the day in third place.
The team was supported throughout the day by members Andrew O’Toole, Preston Miller, Carson Miller, and Safety Captain Elora Wildermuth-Breitzman in the pit. The scouting team in the stands was led by Chacha Binagi and Andrew Zimmermann. Freshman Eli Gonsior took on the task of videoing every match and delivering it immediately to the pit for analysis by the drive team. Freshman Virginia Nelson wore the team’s media badge, photographing the event for the team’s records, and freshmen Jayden Kehrer and Cooper Housel helped with scouting and each spent some time in the pit, learning how an event works. Students were able to take advantage of an Opportunities Fair throughout the day. The fair featured representatives from multiple universities, scholarship providers, and NCWIT, the National Center for Women in Information Technology.
Seven team awards were presented throughout the playoffs, and Ferradermis was honored to receive the T’WISTful Thinking Award Presented by Generac. This award was to celebrate a team with innovative designs and use of materials to create a successful and creative mechanism. The judges were impressed with the team’s use of 3D printing to create custom components and the team’s iterations on their robot design throughout the season.
FIRST Robotics competitions are run by volunteers, and the event on Saturday had over 110 people step up to take on volunteer roles, several of them with ties to Ferradermis. Whitewater’s Administrative Team Captain Maddison LaHaie got her wish to “DJ” and ran the sound system in the gym throughout the day. Ferradermis Advisor Laura Masbruch volunteered as a Judge, gaining valuable insight for the team on the judging process used at all FRC events. Several Ferradermis alumni were also at the event as volunteers including MSOE student Reilly Aschenbrener, UW-Madison student Kay Mikos, and former Head Coach DIlpreet Randhawa. Thank you to volunteer team mentors Kat Dunham, Tori Breisath, and Paul Kriegel for supporting the team throughout the day. Thank you also to alum Zach Brantmeier for spending time with the team in the pit and helping troubleshoot the code on the team’s second robot.
At a FIRST Robotics Competition event, a unicorn match is a match where the two alliances earn all possible ranking points. TWIST took this concept to a whole new level with charity matches for Children’s Hospital. Many off-season events include some aspect of community service, and our hosts for TWIST chose to create a competition between teams to bring in the most LEGO kits to be donated to Children’s Hospital. Our Head Coach Mark Zimmermann graciously agreed to don a unicorn costume if Ferradermis brought in enough LEGO kits to earn a spot in the match. Thanks in great part to generous Whitewater community members who ordered kits and had them shipped to the high school, Ferradermis was able to donate 32 LEGO Kits, won a $25 gift certificate for REV Robotics, and earned a spot in the match! The participating teams donated a total of 217 kits.
Ferradermis will enter its 10th and final competition of the 2024 Crescendo season on October 25-26 at Roboteer Rumble in Tremont, Illinois, where they will face off with 36 robots from Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa. The new 2025 Reefscape season will kick off on January 4.