BY Mike McKenna
The Wood River Robotics team has two problems.
The first is that they’ve run out of room to put all their trophies. The second is something we can help with. They need our assistance to send them to the World Championships next month in Kentucky.
“We’re really excited to represent our school at Worlds,” sophomore Tate Pearce said. “Now we have to figure out how to pay for it, so we’re holding a raffle for a cool bike from Power House (Pub) and a fly-fishing reel from Waterworks-Lamson, and we even have a GoFundMe page.” (See below for more details.)
The BCB Bots, as the program is called for short, was created in 2009. That’s when Kevin Lupton, who has been teaching engineering and architecture at Wood River High since 1994, was invited to enter a team in a Vex Robotics contest at his alma mater, Utah State University. Despite not knowing much about robotics contests, Mr. Lupton rallied a few students together and followed the advice of his master’s thesis professor, who had offered the invitation: “If you wait until you’re ready, you never will be.”
By 2012, Wood River High School was hosting the first robotics contest in the state. And our community of impassioned students and dedicated teachers have been setting the robotics bar high in the Gem State ever since.
“You just jump in feet first and learn while you go. That’s a lot of what robotics is,” Mr. Lupton said, explaining that robotics is “for students who are driven. For engineering students who want more. It’s a competitive team and it’s their winter sport.”
Sophomore Elizabeth Baledge is a member of one of the four high school and middle school teams. There are also teams at both Hailey and Bellevue elementary schools. Each season the teams take on problems developed by Vex Robotics and then compete at a handful of tournaments before, hopefully, qualifying to compete against the best of the other roughly 9,000 robotics teams worldwide.
“It’s a mental challenge, but there’s so much more to it than just calculus, algebra or geometry,” Elizabeth explained. “You can get an idea and bring it to life. A lot of people in robotics have pretty open minds and are willing to work together.”
Being able to work as a team is key to the success of the BCB Bots program. Intelligence and effort alone won’t get a team to the World Championships four years in a row or allow it to win the Excellence Award at every tournament so far this year.
“We help each other and push each other to do better,” Elizabeth said.
Both Wood River High School and Wood River Middle School will be sending teams to the World Championships in Kentucky on back-to-back weekends in April. To help keep their inspiring story going, please visit their fundraising webpage at www.tinyurl.com/tws-bots or contact Coach Lupton at (208) 578-5020, ext. 2224.
The BCB Bots will be selling raffle tickets and putting on a demonstration at The Chamber’s Business After Hours this month at Mountain Humane on Thursday, March 21, from 5-7 p.m. As usual, the “BAH” is free and the public is welcome.
Mike McKenna is the executive director of The Chamber – Hailey & The Wood River Valley. He can be reached at Mike@ValleyChamber.org or by calling (208) 788-3484.