Trinity robotics team second at state | News

HULL—Trinity Christian High School’s robotics team placed second at the FIRST Tech Challenge Iowa Championship, earning a trip to the World Championship which will be held April 24-27 in Detroit.

The Iowa Championship was held Friday-Saturday, Feb. 22-23, at the Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Coralville.

The team placed first in its division the black alliance at the Iowa Championship, and faced the gold alliance division winner in the championship round. It lost in the final round by 35 points and placed second overall.

“We were very proud of the team’s performance,” said coach Toby Boogerd. “Being the winning alliance guaranteed us the trip to worlds.”

Trinity Christian’s team the BzBots entered the competition ranked third in the state. Forty-eight teams competed at the event.

This is the third year in a row that Trinity Christian has had a team compete for the state championship.

“We’re pretty excited. We feel we have the best chance we’ve had in the three years we’ve been doing this,” Boogerd said. “It’s starting to catch on. There is a lot of buzz among the students.”

The BzBots is made up of nine team members: seniors Ivan De Vries and Lydia Huizenga; juniors Luke Andringa, Andrew Kuiper and Dawson Vis; sophomore Kaleb Van Maanen; and freshmen Brody Driesen, Kyle Gritters and Belle Schiermeyer.

Participation is open to any high school student. This season’s team is similar in size to past teams, but Boogerd said teams range from five to 12 members.

FIRST is a national K-12 program that challenges students to design, build, program and operate robots to compete in head-to-head challenges. At the end of a competition, an overall winner is crowned and teams are acknowledged for achievement in several categories such as design, control and innovation.

Each season, FIRST introduces a new game that the teams will compete in. This season’s game, Rover Ruckus, is a simulation of a moon mission. Four teams play at a time and are randomly split in pairs that work together.

“They start in the middle of the arena hanging on a big thing that stands up on four legs called the lander,” Boogerd said. “They dump a flag in a certain spot to claim that part of the moon. Then they have to gather what’s called minerals — they are balls and orange squares — they are stuck in a crater and they need to get those minerals out and do different things for points. At the end they hang back on the lander again.”

The BzBots won first place at its state-qualifying event held at Western Iowa Tech Community College in Sioux City. Among the schools that compete in Trinity Christian’s league include Central Lyon, Sioux Center and LeMars.

“They really act as a team and rely on each others’ skills. Some are strong in programming, engineering or designing,” Boogerd said. “We’ve gotten really aggressive in documenting everything we do in our notebook. They get to read what failed and what worked.”

The robotics team opens another opportunity for students who want to participate in an extracurricular activity.

“They get to be a part of something outside of the normal northwest Iowa basketball, volleyball and football. We do even have some that still play those sports,” Boogerd said. “They still get to be part of a team, but they are learning real-world scenarios and building a good foundation for themselves in what their career and life is going to be.”