Robotics Club improves at regionals, falls short of desired placement

Emma Elliott, Staff Writer

Robotics Club made it to alliance finals when they traveled to an annual regional competition created by For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology Robotics late last week in Kansas City to compete against other schools and their robots .

The club payed $5,000 for a membership fee to participate in a single regional event. This provides basic parts and access to all of the web resources the club has.

From here, students are given six weeks to create a robot capable of completing given tasks.

“Our robot is able to scoop up these big round balls and it fits them through a conveyor belt system and deposits them in rocket ship spaces,” sponsor Janet Stark said. “It also goes after these circular panels and places them on the outside of the rocket to hold the balls inside.”

The competition includes 70 matches where random alliances of three face off to earn points. The top eight teams then choose two alliance mates for finals, and whoever wins continues on to worlds.

Manhattan High made it to a finals alliance despite being a lower-ranked robot, according to Stark.

“We finaled out at 29th, but we were chosen for the seventh place alliance,” Matthew Ewers, junior, said. “We ended up not doing as well as hoped but we are still extremely impressed on how well our robot performed and how well out team functioned this year.”

With placing the highest they have in the last three years and freshman Ava Chae driving the robot — a large role for a student in her class — the team feels they did well.

“[I was] nervous…I was a little confident that we did really well,” Chae said. “I broke down a couple times but other than that I think it went really good.”