From the back of a truck on a highway, a two-foot-tall robot dangled. The truck pulled up to Lee Summit High School in Lee Summit, Missouri. There, the robot was entered in For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology’s Cow Town ThrowDown, an unofficial tournament created to warm up high school robotics teams for the rest of the year.

The event was on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28 and 29. Manhattan High, one of the 50 teams which attended, did not place, but this did not perturb its members, who face unique challenges as part of a club that has only existed at MHS for two years and has many new members.

“We got experience; we did it; we had fun,” senior Zach Culbertson said.

The first part of the competition was practice rounds, which MHS did not take part in because its robot was injured on the drive to Lee Summit. Team members hooked their robots up to the “field” where they would later compete via radio so they automatically started at the same time.

At the beginning of the qualification rounds, MHS hooked its robot up to the field. Qualification rounds consisted of a randomly chosen group of three robots facing another group of three — six teams divided into two alliances. Because the competition served mainly as a warm-up, it mimicked the one held last year. In “pits,” nine-by-nine areas marked with tape, the two groups raced each other to attack a fake castle. Robots earned points by scaling walls, crossing moats and shooting foam dodgeballs. One or two members from each team were in charge of controlling the robot during teleoperated mode. The eight teams who scored the most points moved on to final rounds.

Final rounds were on Saturday, and MHS stayed to watch. It was bracket play with a twist: each team was allowed to pick three more to form an alliance.

Manhattan High’s team members enjoyed attending the competition.

“It was a good experience to have,” team captain of the mechanical pad Owen Li, senior, said. “The actual competition is very different from just working on the robot after school; there’s a lot more pressure timewise and so it’s good to have our new members go through that so they’ll gain a lot of experience for the regional competition, which actually matters.”