BotsKC

This is the first year that Wellsville has had a Robotics team and both of my boys were fortunate enough to be on it!  They will tell you that the high schoolers did the lion's share of work on "Unobot", their first-ever robot, but it was still cool that they were included on the team.  The big BotsKC competition was Friday and Saturday, and this is when their robot gets in the ring with bots from other schools from all over the Midwest, including some colleges.

There was quite the bracket for Saturday's competition, with our first match being against Basehor-Linwood.

Evelyn went along to watch and we all had to wear safety glasses in the arena.

Time for the first match! Wellsville is in the blue shirts and they wheeled Unobot to the ring for battle.

Unfortunately, this match didn't last long. One of Unobot's battery's got disconnected and so our robot was lifeless within the first minute, and we had to concede.

We had a break after that match and decided to go on a tour they were offering of the LMV automotive systems warehouse.  This is the largest manufacturer of automotive parts in North America.  They began the tour by showing us the parts of the Ford Transit and Chevy Malibu that they make.

They had 468 robots working to weld the parts together.  The place was quite impressive!

When we made it back from our tour, we discovered that Unobot had already had its second battle. . . and this one did not end well for us, unfortunately.  I guess there were parts flying all over the ring!  Pretty exciting, except when it's your robot leaving all of the carnage.  Oh well, I know it was a great experience for all of the students involved, and this WAS only our first year.  I hope my boys continue to stay involved on the Robotics team in the future!