DULUTH, MN. (KBJR 6) — In the classrooms of local high schools, the world’s future engineers, designers and leaders are hard at work.
“There’s just a lot of knowledge that you get from robotics that is hard to get anywhere else,” said Lydia Stone, co-captain of the Cloquet Ripsaw Robotics team.
High school students involved in First Robotics work together to design, engineer and operate a fully functional robot they send to competition.
But this season, the pandemic has made it more difficult.
“Sourcing aluminum and metal especially right now is insanely hard, we actually had some of our orders canceled because there is just nowhere to get it and we knew shipping would be an issue, but we didn’t realize just like ‘wow it is really an issue,’” said Qasim Mujteba, a captain on Duluth East’s Daredevils Robotics team.
“We’ve had some expensive electronic parts that took a long time to ship and some of the shipping is delayed,” said Jake Mertz, co-captain of Cloquet Ripsaw Robotics.
They’ve also been dealing with fundraising issues.
“Normally, we would be able to go to Cub or SuperOne and do grocery bagging with them usually,” said Landon Compton, Duluth East Daredevils’ Team Management member. “We haven’t been able to do that this year just because of their COVID policies-so it’s been a struggle, that’s been our main revenue usually.”
Members of both the Duluth East Daredevils and Cloquet Ripsaw robotics teams said despite some of the setbacks, support for their teams is still strong.
“The Cloquet community, which we rely heavily on for sponsorships, the small businesses and the parents and the grandparents and our school were still very supportive of our efforts and we didn’t have many places turn us down because of COVID,” Stone said.
The first regional competitions of the season will take place the first week of March at the DECC.
Both Duluth East and Cloquet will be competing.
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