Over spring break the Manhattan High Little Apple Cyborgs robotics team competed in the Central Missouri Regional tournament, where they placed 29th.

Over the past few months the team had been building and coding their robot for the competition.

“For building and coding it takes up basically our entire time up to the competition, roughly eight weeks,” junior Patrick Fu said.

In the tournament the team is grouped up with two other schools to compete in competitions where the teams try to score as many points as possible in two and a half minutes.

“You’re on a team with three other robots. You’re trying to get as many points as a team together,” sophomore Syoma Zharkov said. “So it’s a combination of teamwork, technical and robotics.”

The teams earn points by picking up rings and shooting them into a goal and picking up cones and throwing them into designated areas.

“Our competition was better than last year’s competition since our robot was able to drive in all the rounds and was functional in shooting and scoring,” Fu said.

As a team their Robot was awarded a sustainability award which is awarded to the team that used sustainable practices that have a positive impact on the environment and achieve long-term continuity.

“We actually won an award for sustainability from all the tin and aluminum we used and our reused drive base,” Fu said.

In addition to the teams sustainability award Sophomore Dawson Raw won the Dean’s list award, which is given based on the teams presentation to the judges on the teams impact on the community.

Looking into next year the team hopes to keep improving and in hopes of a new motor to improve their competition.

“We have a good amount of money, but it’s not enough,” Zharkov said. “We have ancient motors that prevent us from winning. We just get pushed around by other robots, because our motors are out of date.”