INDIANAPOLIS — The Center for Inquiry 2 "Steampunk Panthers" are heading to the Vex Robotics World Championship. It's pretty impressive for a team of three. The Panthers are eighth graders Jack Carlson and Oliver Deer, and seventh grader Tate Turman. They started the season off in last place, but coach John Stevenson never lost faith in them.
"They work really hard. They really do," Stevenson said. "Yup, they goof around a little bit. They're kids, they're supposed to goof around a little bit. But when it's time to get serious, they get serious."
The team has designed, built and programmed a robot for the competition. The Vex Robotics competition changes frequently; this year, it is focused on getting balls into a basket:
- Teams get one minute to try and score as many points as possible (though they need to trade off the controller to a teammate in the middle of the competition).
- Each ball you shoot into the hoop is worth six points.
- You can get extra points for hooking your robots to a special rig at the end (there are extra points for climbing the rig, but the Panthers didn't focus on that).
The Panthers have worked their way from last place up to competing at worlds through hard work, practice and problem solving.
"We'll run into a problem, then we'll fix it," Deer said. "And then, we'll run into a problem because we fixed it, or we'll run into just a new problem and we'll fix that. And we just continue to do that until we continually improve our robot."
They've been working six hours a week since winning their birth in the World Championship competition. All of the boys are planning to pursue robotics next year, though two of them will be in high school then. They all want to make a career out of science and technology, too. But first, they need to make the 13 hour drive to Dallas, Texas, for the competition.
If you'd like to help them cover the cost of the trip and their hotel, you can donate at this link.