Siouxland school’s robotics team qualifies for international competition

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KCAU)– In early March 2024, East High School took three teams of students to the Iowa championships, and only one qualified for the 2024 FIRST Championship . Now, those five students are perfecting their robot just in time for the competition.

“This is the fifth time that we’ve been to the Iowa championships, and this will be the second time that East High has qualified for the world championships,” East High science and physics teacher Trevor Miller said. “The last time we qualified was in 2020, but the world championships actually got canceled.”

When creating a robot for these competitions, students have to program it to be able to complete a few jobs.

“It’s kind of like ‘Battle Bots’ except they don’t beat up on each other,” Miller said. “Some of the tasks include picking up these hexagonal pieces called pixels, and then they have to place them on a backboard. One of the tasks, they have to shoot a paper airplane called a drone outside of the match.”

While East High’s robot got them to the 2024 FIRST Championship, the boys have been hard at work since qualifying to make adjustments.

“Essentially it’s just making sure everything works,” senior Garrett Thompson said. “Everything’s getting double checked, triple checked, we’re going through making minor improvement we can in different areas. Obviously we’re a little short on time for what we would love to be able to do, but we’re doing everything we can in order to make sure we can compete to our best ability at the world competition.”

“So because we made changes to the robot, we had to go back and re-tune the whole robot using JAVA script,” senior Garrett Burnight said. “It basically tracks the robot’s exact position on the field and will adjust based off that, so we can do cool things, like we can say ‘hey, go to these coordinates,’ and it will go to those coordinates.”

Next week, East High will go to Houston to face off against 192 robotics teams from around the world, and the students are positive they’ll do great.

“So as the stats show, we are basically the top 100 and something teams in the world currently, so going into worlds we’re going to be the top 50,” Burnight said. “So we’re going to be pretty good, say, already, and then we did really well at our state competition, and I’m pretty confident in our coders and our drivers.”

“By no means do I think we’re the best team in the world,” Thompson said. “I think we’ll do really well, I’m very proud of where we’ve come. I’m really excited for the trip, I think it’s going to be a really good time.”

East High School will fly out to Houston on the April 16 and return on the following Sunday.

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