CHS students win big at Iowa Industrial Tech Expo

The Iowa Industrial Tech Expo held May 14 at Southeast Polk High School in Des Moines saw major prize wins from Creston High School students. For graphics communication, senior Alex Roach won the gold medal. For robotics, the CHS VEX club saw five of its members in the top two. First place winners consisted of Hunter Berger and Jesetta Miller, while Riley DeGonia, Blake Callison and Noah Adams took home second.

The Iowa Industrial Tech Expo is an annual competition where students submit their technological designs in robotics, graphics communication, problem-solving and other categories.

CHS teacher Bill Mullin taught computer-aided design (CAD) to the prize-winning Roach from his sophomore year.

“We have an introductory-level computerated graphing class that’s a semester long that Alex took when he was a sophomore,” Mullin said. “And then this year, he took an advance class called mechanical-technical CAD.”

This was the first year that Roach competed in a statewide industrial tech competition and said he was drawn to machine operations at an early age.

“Well I’ve always had a fascination with mechanical objects of like, any sort, since I was a child” Roach said. “I think my kind of interests were migrating towards steam locomotives, like a train with the cart, that sort of thing, so I thought to myself, ‘hey, I have the skills that I could design my own steam engine of sorts.’”

Roach added his project was underway before he ever decided to compete and Mullin encouraged him to submit it to the expo. Roach said the anticipation of the expo stoked a greater fear within him than the actual competition turned out to be.

“I was stressful going into it because I did not know what to expect since this was my first time going, but after I got into the building it was very calm, very relaxing in a sense,” he said.

Roach said he was looking to get more job experience before deciding on what education to pursue.

Heidi Lumbard said the four VEX robotics teams had to design robots that could pick up balls and shoot hoops, but two teams were chosen to enter. The event also had a tower defense competition in which it was decided two of the sophomore teams had to build robots that could pick up square cubes. The expo continued COVID-19 restrictions which added to the decision for VEX to offer two of it’s teams to compete.

“At the event, they ran a skills challenge style where one robot is in the 12 ft. x 12 ft. field and tries to score the most points they can in two minutes and there were three rounds,” Lumbard said. “Our two teams beat the host school who had all semester to design for this challenge. All teams were rookie teams so it was an even playing field.”