Many students come into the program expecting to play games. By the end of the school year, they'll have built and competed with a functioning robot.
Sawyer's program includes teams for two different competition leagues, both of which are run by For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST): the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) and the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC). The TMS robotics program has one FLL team and three FTC teams, one of which is comprised of high schoolers.
Most of the work is done during class — robotics is an elective — but team members do some work after school and on weekends, too. In fact, so many students wanted to join the program this year, that some are on the teams without actually being in the robotics classes.
FIRST has a lot of scholarship money available, which is part of why Sawyer has focused on FIRST programs and why he's happy to run a high school team.
In fact, Sawyer's own robotics background is from his high school days, when he was part of the Student Technology Association. Robotics scholarships helped him pay for college.
But the TMS robotics program is about far more than sending kids into higher education.
TO EACH HIS OWN
Members of the TMS robotics program joined for different reasons.
Eighth-grader Bryce Hodges signed up for the program because he'd always enjoyed building LEGOs. Another eighth-grader, Garrett Green, said he liked technology.
"I thought it would be a fun class," he said.
For seventh grader Caleb Miller, the decision to join a robotics team was spurred by his family.
"My dad would try to push me to do mechanical things," he said. When his older brother, Zachary Miller, joined the robotics program, Caleb grew interested as well.
And there are many aspects to the robotics program; different kids approach it in different ways. Some find joy in physically building the robots, while others prefer drawing out the designs for them, Sawyer said. Some kids love coding, and others prefer writing up their teams' engineering notebooks, which document their work and information about their team and are judged for points in the competitions.
"It's nuts seeing the amount of creativity" among the students he's working with, Sawyer said.
Garrett's favorite part of being in the robotics program was getting to go to the state FLL competition last school year, while, for Bryce, it was seeing something inanimate spring to life.
"My favorite part was probably when we got our robot to drive for the first time," he said.
Eight-grader Russell Frederick told the Daily Journal that his favorite thing so far was his attempt at building a peanut butter and jelly sandwich machine.
"Last year I made this peanut butter and jelly sandwich maker," Frederick said, "And I think 60 percent of it was made out of tape."
"Did it work?" Garrett asked.
"No," Russell answered with a laugh.
Russell built the sandwich maker as a Rube Goldberg machine — one of Sawyer's class assignments last year. When Russell brought the idea to Sawyer, Sawyer pointed out that, every time the machine squeezes the peanut butter or the jelly, it would need to exert more force the next time, because there would be less of the peanut butter or jelly in the bottle than before. The question became how the machine would increase the force of its squeeze repeatedly.
Even though Russell worked hard on the machine (and ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the process), it never really worked. But that was okay, Sawyer said, because Russell had an interesting idea and learned as he tried to bring it to life.
For Caleb, his favorite thing about being in the robotics program is the friends he's made.
"I made friends all over the state because of going to these competitions and meeting people," he said.
'COOPERATITION'
Getting kids to meet each other and work together is a huge focus of FIRST's competitions.
"They call it 'cooperatition'" — a portmanteau of "cooperation" and "competition" — Sawyer said.
Not only do the students on a given team have to work together with each other, but they also have to work with other teams.
For the first stage of each competition, teams are shuffled randomly into alliances; they have to work with other teams as they compete. And once the competition reaches its elimination rounds, teams choose with whom to ally based on how their strategies fit together.
Teams take inspiration from each other, too. The TMS robotics program hosted an FTC qualifying competition for other Mississippi robotics teams on Dec. 9, and Sawyer's students were running up to him all day with ideas.
"The only problem I had Saturday during the competition was having my kids come ask me stuff about everybody's robot, like, 'Do you think we can do this? What about that? What if we took this part off, or that, and did this to there?" Sawyer said. "They were excited about it."
One thing Sawyer really likes about FIRST is that there's a great deal of variety in how the robots can be designed. No one bot looks quite like another, nor does any function in exactly the same way.
Last year, at a qualifying competition, Sawyer's students spotted a piece that they liked on another team's robot.
"My kids go, 'Coach, we could use something just like that,'" Sawyer said. "I took a picture, figured out what it was."
His students didn't use the exact design of the other robot, but they bought and used the particular piece they'd noticed to make their own robot a little more efficient than it was before.
"Iron sharpens iron," Sawyer said of the competitions.
And the reason the TMS robotics program is able to do all this — build robots, buy new parts, go to competitions — is because of the support the program has received from the school district and the Tupelo community.
A COMMUNITY EFFORT
"When this job opened up, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Sawyer told the Daily Journal. "There's no other middle school around here that has robotics. There's very few schools, high schools included, that have something where kids can do stuff like what we do. Some of that's because of, again, a community who's come around and supported (us) fiscally and time-wise ... and part of that's because we've just got the right leaders ... at the district office and here."
Robotics is expensive. Each FLL robot kit with an expansion box is about $550. But Sawyer, as many in the Tupelo community do, sees the robotics program as a worthwhile investment.
"Everybody realizes right now that robotics is the future," Sawyer said. "This is one of those jobs (where), with enough time and enough creativity, you can have someone who's not necessarily the smartest person, but somebody who's the most willing to learn and adapt, and they can take over the world."
Funding for the program comes from several sources. The school district gives the program some funding, and it helps Sawyer with bookkeeping as he applies for grants from other organizations. The Tupelo Public School District's booster club, the Association for Excellence in Education, gave the TMS robotics program a $7,000 grant this school year.
There's also a booster club specifically for TMS robotics made up of parents who have kids in the program. They've been a huge factor in making the robotics program what it is.
"They ask me, 'Hey, what do you need?,' and then they go get it for me," Sawyer said.
Not only does the robotics booster club help financially, but it also lends Sawyer manpower. Managing 30 kids working on multiple robots and projects at once isn't a one-man job. Chaz and Lynn Miller — parents of Caleb and Zachary Miller — are two of his frequent helpers.
"Without Lynn Miller, we would not have a program this big," Sawyer said.
TMS Principal Mark Enis has created a work environment that allows robotics students to pursue the things they are interested in, Sawyer said. And of course, Sawyer added, he'd never have been able to put so much time and effort into the robotics program without his wife's help.
And all this work and money is, ultimately, focused on helping Tupelo kids learn.
BUILDING ROBOTS, BUILDING KNOWLEDGE
Sawyer told the Daily Journal that one of the best things about his job is watching students go from asking him questions to telling him what they're going to do. They problem-solve for themselves.
"There's nothing like watching a kid who has struggled with something, and they get it figured out," Sawyer said. "It's just exciting."
It's around the beginning of their second semester that his new students really start feeling comfortable. They even start teaching each other when one knows something another doesn't.
Sawyer encourages this independence. Unless something is broken, or there's an especially delicate piece that needs to be taken on or off, he avoids doing any work on the robots himself. The robots are the kids' work, he said. Not his.
"I like the feeling of seeing what you've built, and then watching it move around and do exactly what you wanted it to do," Caleb said.
"I like building because I think it's fun to build something, but then change it all again and make it better," Bryce added.
And Sawyer has just as much fun as the kids.
"I love every day I come to work," he said. "I mean, who else gets paid to play with LEGOs, build cool crap? I really have got the best job in the world."
©2023 the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (Tupelo, Miss.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
