By Joel Frady

A robot dragon that moves its tail and arms while telling stories may sound like something out of a movie, but students in the Technology Student Association (TSA) at Ashe County High School crafted such a robot – and have a first place finish in the animatronics category of the North Carolina TSA competition to show for it. The project was one of three from the school that won awards, along with junior Dustin Roten’s individual first place award in the Future Technology Teacher category and junior Logan Scott’s third place award in the pin design competition.

The state TSA conference was held in Greensboro from March 22-24.

Thelma Kastl, technology teacher at the school and coordinator of the TSA after-school program, said that the wins culminated months of hard work by her students.

“I wanted to do backflips. I can’t, but I wanted to,” said Kastl. “These guys, after seeing them work so hard and their dedication and what it meant to them, it made my career worth it.” She added that it was an upset for the school in the animatronics category, which had been won for several years by students from the Highlands School of Technology.

“I’m very, very proud of these young men,” she said. “I have never seen such dedication and perseverance. They dealt with a lot to get that to work. They problem-solved. You couldn’t ask for better kids.”

Roten and junior Daniel Farmer designed the dragon project to promote reading.

“We wanted to do something that was going to encourage kids to read more books and be more active in the library because of the low reading rate for children right now,” said Farmer. “We decided that we’d make a dragon that we could program with a voice to tell a story from a book.” He noted that “eventually, it will be able to tell the story, move its arms, its eyes will light up and its tail wags. We hope to eventually be able to make smoke come out of its nose.” They plan to program the dragon to read two books, The Paperback Princess and Purple Hair, I Don’t Care.

Roten said that he was surprised by the win.

“We thought we had a good chance, but we were pretty surprised when we got first place,” he said. “We beat the Highlands School of Technology; for us, that was pretty unbelievable.”

Roten said that he created a 45-minute lesson plan on NASA’s ST-8 project for his teaching presentation, but was given only 10 minutes at the TSA competition to tell judges how he would teach the lesson.

“They really seemed to like the project,” Roten said of the judges.

With their first-place finishes, the students will now prepare to compete in the national TSA conference that will be held from June 28 to July 2 in Denver, Colo. Although their projects won on the state level, Kastl and her students know that more hard work will be required to compete on the national level.

Kastl said that they are “going to need better equipment than we started with.

“We’re using motors that roll up car windows, a drive shaft from a drill and a borrowed PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) from Wilkes Community College,” she said.

Farmer estimated that the dragon needs “about 25 hours of work,” and Roten said that they would like new motors to add movement to the dragon such as flapping wings. The dragon currently doesn’t speak, either, which must be addressed before the national convention.

Kastl said that in addition to motors, they will also have to fundraise the $100 registration fee for each student and funds to cover airfare and lodging.

Kastl said that the honored students were “good role models” for the TSA program, which was created to “get kids to be interested in engineering, because there’s such a shortfall of engineers in the U.S.”

To find out more about the TSA program at Ashe County High School, or their upcoming trip to Denver, contact Kastl at (336) 846-2400 or e-mail thelma_kastl@yahoo.com.