The Enginerds Compete at the Robotics World Championship

This year, Waukee’s Robotics team (the Enginerds) had the opportunity to go to the Robotics World Championship due to their excellence and hard work this season. AJ Brown, a senior on the team, shared with the Arrowhead about his experience. “Making it to Worlds has been our big goal since starting robotics,” AJ said. “We had an older team from Waukee go a few years back and it inspired all of us.” This year is many of the Enginerds last year in the Robotics program at Waukee, due to many of them being seniors. “It feels like a really good end to our high school robotics experience. It’s like a culmination of all our hard work.”

It wasn’t easy!

Making it to Worlds was no easy feat for the Enginerds. AJ shared “We had to make it past qualifiers and super qualifiers, and then win State.” Although it sounds simple enough, AJ shared that even making it to State was difficult. “There were a few moments in the season where we were worried that we wouldn’t even make it to state, much less win it. Our robot went through a rebuild halfway through the season where we threw out the old design and rebuilt and improved on it.” He also shared how big of a deal it was to be able to win State. “There were over 80 teams at State and only 3 teams could move onto Worlds. Two of those spots were based on team awards like outreach and only one was for the robots themselves.” He then added, “In other words, our team moved onto Worlds by having the best robot in the state of Iowa.”

They wouldn’t have it any other way

Beyond the challenge of just making it, the Enginerds had other issues to worry about. “Being able to financially make it there was also an issue. Just being able to raise money for it, when registration alone was $2,000.” They were able to raise this money from donations and sponsors who wanted to help the Enginerds have this opportunity. “We are super grateful to all the people who donated on the go-fund-me and all the people who helped us get sponsors. In all honesty, we could not have gone on this trip without those people helping us out,” AJ said.
When it came to the competition itself, AJ shared that “The experience was really cool. We woke up early each day and the majority of the day was spent with robots and other teams. One of my favorite parts was going around from team to team and meeting lots of different people from other parts of the world.” The teams who made it to Worlds were the best of the best, being that they had to make it through so many other competitions and beat so many other teams to make it there. “Only 160 First Tech challenge teams went to Worlds,” AJ said. He shared that only 3 of the teams at Worlds were from Iowa. “There were people from all over the world too, over 20 different countries were represented there.”
Overall, the Enginerds had a great time at the Robotics World Championship. AJ concluded by saying, “All in all there were a lot of challenges, but part of being on the robotics team is overcoming problems. Everyone on the team worked together and we overcame all the obstacles that were presented to us.”