Rolling with robotics
Texas High T-Bots attend first competition of the season
Photo by Truth Dukes
Sophomore Evan Wyshe hooks up his controller and prepares to compete in his first match of the season. Four teams attended the competition at Redwater this weekend.
October 11, 2022
An alarm sounds to signal the start of a match. Motors wire as discs are launched through the air. Students cheer for their teammates to score just one more point.
Texas High T-Bots attended their first competition of the year on Oct. 9 at Redwater Highschool. The first competition is always rocky, but in the end, the group did get to walk away with a few awards.
“I’d say they definitely performed higher than anticipated,” Robotics sponsor Mark Ahrens said. “Going forward, I think the competition will get better. But today I think it was given an A overall.”
The teams got a little shaken up this year with the departure of last year’s seniors and the addition of this year’s freshmen. However, the group is making the best of it.
“I love the new groups,” junior Salem Alonge said. “They’re very alike in mind. They match each other energy wise and personality wise.”
While the road to get there was a struggle, two of the four teams did manage to make it to the quarter finals, and one team, 3350C, made it all the way to the semi finals before being eliminated. In addition, team 3350A won the Innovation award.
“Personally, I think [the competition] was great,” junior Cristal Hernandez said. “I felt it was more like a learning experience rather than a competition. It was our first of the season so it was kind of like everyone was barely starting to get in.”
Despite what most people believe, there’s more to competitions than just driving robots. Teams rely on a good interview and building alliances with other teams if they want to have any chance of winning an award.
“Based off of this first competition, I think that we need to practice a lot more for interviews, because interviews are a lot more important than we actually think they are,” Hernandez said. “And also with socializing and things because that’s a big part of it, too.”
The teams hope that with an extra week to prepare, their next competition will provide better results. However, with the competition being three hours away, that means teams from beyond Texarkana will be competing.
“[There will be] a lot of different teams, a lot of Dallas based teams,” Ahrens said. “Some of these teams have been around for a little while. It’ll give us something to actually gauge where we are better.”
While the teams might have hoped to do better, overall, the competition was a good experience, and they’re ready to see what next weekend brings.
“Today was a really fun day,” Alonge said. “The teams who were the underdogs at the beginning really came in and rose up.”
