WILLMAR — Robots and teams of students from 19 area high schools will take over Willmar Senior High School’s gyms Saturday to show off the robots they’ve built this winter.
The public is invited to come to see the robots and watch the matches, which begin at 9 a.m. and end at 3:45 p.m.
The FIRST Robotics Week Zero event is like a preseason scrimmage for the teams, a chance to judge the performance of the robots they spent the past six weeks building.
Willmar robotics coach Mike Kroeker said they hope people come out to see what’s going on in the schools, and to show younger kids what they could do when they’re older.
Most of the teams are from schools in the area, but teams from Grand Forks, North Dakota, and St. Michael-Albertville, Minnesota, schools also plan to participate.
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Teams have a different challenge each year. This year, it’s a transportation-themed challenge, sponsored by Boeing. Robots gather cargo (large rubber balls) off the tarmac and deposit it in hoppers in the hub. In the final seconds, the robots are to race to a hangar and climb a ladder.
The challenge is revealed to all teams on the same day, and they then receive their building kits. They are given six weeks to build and test their robots, and the deadline is fast approaching.
Wednesday afternoon, Willmar’s WARPSPEED 4239 team was hard at work, trying to make up for lost time because of a snow day Tuesday.
“We lost five hours of work time,” said senior Mason Winzenburg, 18.
Robotics coaches Kroeker and Ian Bergh helped out or offered some advice but the team members were busy and working on their own in small groups. Kroeker said the busy group isn’t difficult to supervise. “Nobody’s standing around,” he said.
Junior Kole Lindemann, 17, was working on the attachment that would help the robot climb the ladder. It’s his third year on the team.
“I like the hands-on part,” he said. “We find a problem, find the solution to that problem, and then we build it.”
Natasha Valenzuela-Cabrera, 16, a sophomore, is the team’s head electrician in her second year on the team. She said the wiring was complete, but the coding team was troubleshooting a problem with the computer coding that would run the robot.
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“Without the code we can’t run the robot,” she said. The team has put “a lot of heart and soul” into the robot, she added.
