This year is the first time that Manhattan High has had the Robotics Club, where members will design one robot together to compete with in March.

“We’ve joined FRC which is the FIRST Robotics Competition,” club sponsor Carla Johnston said, “and it’s an international organization through U.S. FIRST that gives students the opportunity to participate in competitions and for our age group it is specific to robotics. So we’ll actually be going to a regional competition in Kansas City from March 9 to 12 and we’ll be able to show off the robot that we built and have it compete against other teams in our area.”

This past Saturday marked the start of the build season where Johnston and Kathy Ricketts, another sponsor for the club, brought a couple students to what was known as the FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff at Garmin in Olathe.

“It was the kickoff for the season where this season’s challenge was revealed on Saturday and so now all the teams know what their challenge is,” Johnston said.

Students were shown a video that revealed the challenge asking members to program a robot that must be able to perform a series of tasks in an arena.  

“And so we were in an auditorium at Garmin with a lot of other students and teams that we’ll be competing against and then we received our kit of parts and so there’s different things that we got in [several] crates,” Johnston said.

Every team received a Kickoff Kit that included a plethora of materials and equipment including wheels, aluminum, various electrical components, game controllers and a laptop with a joystick. Each team will be able to use these materials and additional materials if they choose, to construct their robot. However, if a team chooses to use additional materials, they have to purchase them on their own, which is costly.

“Our school district has been very supportive as far as awarding our team a grant to pay for some of this undertaking,” Johnston said. “It costs $6,000 to register for a regional competition and to get the initial equipment that your team needs to participate in FRC. But we are looking for sponsors because there are additional things the team has to buy [including] additional tools and additional pieces of equipment that aren’t included in that $6,000 cost that the team has to purchase, and so we’ve sent out some fundraising emails to businesses in town but we are definitely looking for other sponsors.”

MHS students also had the opportunity to build a test robot to learn more about how to assemble the actual robot.

“[What I like most was] learning a lot from a lot of the more experienced people about electrical things and how it works,” member John Benfer said.

The MHS Robotics Club only has six weeks to design, build and program their robot with the help of all four sponsors for the club — Johnston, Ricketts, Jacob Thies, and Chris George — and three adult mentors.

“I think the competition will be a lot of fun when we actually control the robot and see how we do in competition with other teams,” Benfer said.