Mr. Roboto Plays Soccer

We just spent an exciting weekend in Salt Lake City watching robots play soccer! How fun is that?! Devin's team competed at the First Robotics Regional Competition and did very well!

His team, Haywire Robotics, is made up of students from Century, Pocatello and Highland High Schools. They have to be recommended by a teacher, complete an application and resume' and then be selected from a group of applicants to represent Pocatello. It was pretty exciting that Devin was asked to be on the team as a computer specialist, and he loved every minute of it.

Devin got to work with a great group of kids and wonderful mentors, led by Mark Edwards, a retired teacher who coaches them each year. Teams from all over the world got together on January 5 to see a broadcast that showed what the robotics challenge would be this year. Since then, they have been working nonstop to design, program and build a robot that would competitive. Devin was at Haywire from 5-10 pm almost every night of the week, usually with just one night off. It was a serious project and hopes were high, since they were on a winning alliance last year and went to the national competition.
They really had a lot of fun working together, as you can see!


The competition was held in the Huntsman Center in SLC. The playing field had a scoring side for each team and a center section for a robot to retrieve balls to shoot to the teammates. Each of the 33 teams was randomly partnered with different alliances during the seeding rounds. Later, the 8 teams whose alliances had scored the most points overall were allowed to choose final alliances according to which robots had skills they felt were compatible with theirs. Our team, 1569, ended up being in an alliance with the team from Idaho Falls, the Ammoknights (they're in the city of Ammon) and one from Woods Cross, Utah.Here's our robot, named Conestoga, about to kick a ball to try to score. We did pretty well with our shooting and steering and scored quite a few points during the competition. The alliance we were on made it to the semifinals, but got knocked out in the final round by a team from California, the Holy Cows. They were ranked number one, but they started having a few problems with their robot. We wished they had had problems before knocking us out of the finals! The winning alliance had a Boise team on it, so we were really excited to have an Idaho winner again this year. There were 7 states represented at our regional competition. Our robot won an award for using innovative controls. There was only one other robot in the competition that had a similar type of control mechanism.The best thing about our team is that they had a great time and made sure everyone else did, too. They were on the floor for the entire time both days, starting dances, waves and anything else to get people involved. The other teams would join in and help Haywire cheer whatever teams happened to be playing.

Devin even got involved and did the Macarena, the YMCA and some line dancing. He had a great time. One of the judges told our team that they had made the competition so fun for everyone there. Because of this, our team won the Team Spirit Award, too! They were so excited! There were also 2 students out of hundreds who won a leadership award, and one was from our team! The Haywire cheering was deafening!

This was such a fabulous experience! There is a $12 million scholarship fund for competitors each year, so there are lots of good reasons why it's a great competition. Devin had an incredible time and we had lots of fun watching him!