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Bosque School
Bosque School

Bobcat Stories

Donut Dreams: Bosque School's Robotics Team Prepares for 'High Stakes' Challenge

The Bosque School competitive robotics team members are deep in the process of building robots for this year's Vex V5 game, "High Stakes," and their first contest against other schools was at the end of October.

This year, the team is building robots that pick up plastic donuts from the ground, drive the donuts across an arena, and stack them on a pedestal. The robots also must defend their pedestals from other teams and unstack the pedestals of their opponents, creating lots of opportunities for creative robotics engineering.

The upper school team is building a robot that will use an extendable arm to pick up donuts, swing them around, and drop them. The 8th-grade team is working on a robot that uses a conveyor belt to scoop donuts off the ground and shoot them through the air. The 6th and 7th-grade teams are hard at work getting the structures of their robots in place so they can start adding motors, drive components, and more.

Competitive robotics, which meets after school on Mondays and Tuesdays, is open to all students at Bosque School. Students build all year long and compete several times throughout the year. Nearly all students start with zero robotics experience. Over time, they learn the basic principles of mechanical engineering and simple robotics programming. Visitors to the schoolhouse during robotics meetings will be impressed by how middle school math teacher Spencer Baum and middle and upper school science teacher Trista Fussner manage the students’ engagement, burgeoning engineering skills, and general exuberance. Visitors might also want to wear a hard hat to protect themselves from unidentified flying donuts!