Bobcat Robotics Team attends Super Regional competition

The Hot Springs County High School Robotics Team attended a Super Regional competition in Oakland, Calif. over the weekend, where they placed 32 out of 36.

Coach Steve Radabaugh said he was proud the robotics team made it to the competition.

"I'm personally really proud that we were able to go," he said. "We went and we saw what the best teams do. Next year, we can go in doing what all the best teams were doing and compete at that next level."

The Super Regional is a competition between all of the western states. Only four teams from Wyoming attended, Radabaugh said.

"It was a learning experience for us," he said. "We need to step it up. We need to focus quicker and get a robot working earlier."

Senior Kayla Anderson, lead programmer for the robotics team, said the first day of the competition was spent preparing the robot and providing the finishing touches.

"We also did inspections to make sure our robot fit all of the regulations," she said. "Then we went to the judges to talk about all of the community service we did and how we raised money to get to the competition and how our robot worked."

Kayla said the next day was the qualification round of the competition, where the team competed every ten minutes. The team had some connection issues, but had more luck the last day of the competition.

"We still didn't do very good but we did better than we thought we would," she said. "The challenge this year was to pick up debris that they scattered across the field and dump them in buckets on this mountain that has angles that gradually get steeper. There were also climbers, which are like little people you pick up and drop in the bucket. We pretty much perfected that. We had 100 percent completion on that one. We didn't get very far up the mountain because our robot weighed a ton and we didn't have the right wheels or treads to lead the way."

The robotics team went through three robots before beginning work on the one they took to the competition. They had been working on the competition robot since December, Kayla said.

"Teamwork is a big factor for something like this," she said. "It's like sports in a lot of ways because it requires communication and hard work. We learned a lot though and had a lot of fun."

The Hot Springs County High School Robotics Team members who attended the super regional competition were senior Kayla Anderson, senior Matthew Tjepkies, junior Kole Cox, sophomore Wyatt Wright, sophomore Chris Slagle, freshman Ben Manning, freshman Lane Randall, freshman Josh Canfield and freshman Aaron Goodrich. Coaches included Steve Radabaugh and London Jenks.