By Jim Newell
Review Editor
The rookies are headed to World Championships and watch out for the new kids on the block.
The Scripps Middle School Robotics Team 11691 will compete in the FIRST Robotics championship against other robotics teams from around the nation and world April 27-29 in St. Louis.
The team has twelve members, mostly sixth graders, said Mike Tefend, one of the team adult mentors.
Team 11691 will take their robot “Twitch” to the competition to see how he stacks up against the other teams.
The Scripps team qualified for the World Championships after placing second at the FIRST Tech Challenge North Super Regional robotics tournament in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in late March, where they competed against 70 teams from 14 states.
Since then, the team has been hard at work tweaking “Twitch” and refining their competition skills. Last week, the team practiced at the high school, working out glitches, making sure everything was set for competition.
The team build a robot that uses cellphone technology, as well as metal gears, motors, sensors and game controllers.
Tefend said he’s proud of the team and did not quite expect this level of success.
“I didn’t expect it. A lot of it’s luck when you go into meets. We’ve had a lot things go our way,” Tefend said, adding that the Scripps team is one of only two middle school teams from Michigan going to the World Championships. “It’s been crazy. The kids have a lot of fun.”
At the Super Regionals, Team 11691 performed so well that they were ranked fourth at the end of the first day. Varsity teams lined up and approached them to try to form an alliance – something unheard of.
“Varsity teams don’t form alliances with middle school teams. It was hilarious,” Tefend said.
“That was really cool. We’re a rookie team, we’re a middle school team. So, having high schoolers come up and ask us (to form an alliance) was pretty cool,” said Max Amburgey, a seventh grader.
The team has been working since September on their robot and hope all the hard work comes to a pinnacle at Worlds.
“Just learning that I could build a robot was pretty fun,” said sixth-grader David Tefend, adding that he’s looking forward to seeing teams from all over the world at the championship.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the other teams’ robots and what they can do because they’re from different parts of the world,” said seventh-grader Logan Thurber.