Thunder Mountain High School (Photo Credit: CBJ.)
Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – Juneau Douglas High School students involved in robotics won awards at the southeast regional robotics tournament over the weekend at Thunder Mountain High School and will be going on to state next month.
The tournament was for the Robotics Competition as part of the FIRST program.
The competition challenges teams of young people and their mentors to solve a common problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard “kit of parts” and a common set of rules. Teams build robots from the parts and compete in games.
The upperclassmen team “Capital City Dynamics” had placed first in the challenge, and won the Inspire award. The underclassmen team placed third in the robot challenge, won the design award, and was chosen by the upperclassmen team as their finalist alliance partner.
JD Senior Adrian Whitney, whose Captain of Capital City Dynamics, and JD Freshman Ferguson Wheeler, team member and robot driver of the “Mandela Effect,” were guests on Action Line.
Whitney said they had not expected to win going in.
“It was mostly Juneau teams, and a lot of the competition is alliances and working together. So I don’t think we could have won without working together with all the other Thunder Mountain teams there. Also, it was a really fun collaboration, and in the end, we did win the robotics competition, which I was not expecting at the start. I was unsure of whether we could do it, but we did so I was really, really happy about the end result and we get to take our freshman team to state this year,” he said.
They were asked what they have planned for the state competition.
“We need to get some more fundraising because we have to bring a whole nother team to stay which we’re unsure,” he said. “The robot is never done. In engineering, you never have something perfected. So we have a whole month to make as many changes as we can and continue growing our program and our competition. It’s gonna be a long month.”
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