Liberty Robo-Lions Win Major Competition at Battle O' Baltimore

topped 21 high school teams from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina at the Battle O’ Baltimore competition, bringing home the trophy for the first time in the five years the robotics team has competed and helped host the battle.

Rose Young, senior mentor for FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”) robotics teams for Maryland, former Liberty High School science teacher and current math and science teacher at The Barrie School, led the team to its  this year.

“We’ve come heartbreakingly close in the past,” said Young. “This year, the team has been very cohesive, and applied many of the lessons they learned over time, and it paid off.”         

The Battle O’ Baltimore was held at Woodlawn High School Saturday and is part of the FIRST robotics competition.

The battle is the Maryland FIRST team’s off-season event and is held annually in the summer.

Saturday’s competition began with a morning of seeding matches that set the stage for how the teams would be matched up for the remainder of the day. 

“The Robo-Lions were frustrated in early matches by a series of challenges, in spite of several weeks of practice and tuning,” said Young.

The matches are played three-on-three in a random assignment. The teams must place inner tube playing pieces shaped like the components of the FIRST logo on racks at the end of an arena. For bonus points, the robots deploy smaller “minibots” to climb a tower 10 feet high at the end of the game. The game is in honor of Jack Kamen, the artist who created the FIRST logo, which features a triangle, a circle and a square. 

“Some matches were lopsided due to breakdowns of alliance partners and others were well-played, but the opponents played just a bit better. The team ended up with three wins and three losses, but by then the bugs were worked out,” said Young.

In the end, working out the bugs was what made the difference for the Robo-Lions, who, along with every team in the FIRST competition, were given six weeks at the beginning of every “build season” to build, test, program and design the robot to complete the game.

“There is always an element of luck, and the team knows that, but it really makes the weekend to be one of the teams who gets to go down on the field for the award ceremony and receive the trophy, shake hands with the judges and take pictures afterwards,” said Young.

“Of course, we didn’t get to leave right away to celebrate—as one of the co-hosts, the entire team stayed for more than an hour breaking down equipment, loading trucks and cleaning up. It’s part of our tradition, but I noticed it was more cheerfully done than ever!”

In the coming season, opportunities to participate on a FIRST team in Carroll County will be expanded to include most high schools. Any middle or elementary school with at least 5-10 interested students and volunteer coaches, according to Young.

The Robo-Lions will be funded through a new nonprofit corporation called Partnership and Inspiration for Engineering Education and Entrepreneurship, or PIE3. The mission of PIE3 is to provide support to STEM programs in the Carroll County area for all students.

Currently the Robo-Lions are without a practice space after . They then lost the space the BTR Capital Group donated in the former London Fog factory warehouse because a paying business moved in.

According to Young, there has been “no luck finding a home, but a garage will do in a pinch—it’s our backup plan!”

For more information on the Robo-Lions, contact Rose Young at youngrose@comcast.net.