Iron Kings First Competition
Lewis Cass has a lot of extracurricular activities. We have sports such as Baseball, Volleyball, Football, Band, Cheer, Track, etc. Our most popular or successful extracurricular activity is the Marching Band. Being in an extracurricular activity is a great way to have fun, meet other people with the same interests, and get scholarships for doing what you love. It is also a great opportunity to get But we have another extracurricular activity that is a very nice one to be in, robotics.
Just recently, the Lewis Cass and Logansport Robotics team went to a competition. The competition has two parts, Autonomous and Teleoperated. The autonomous portion is when the robot moves by itself with no user input. The teleoperated portion is when drivers drive the bot around. The way to earn points vary, but the two main goals are to shoot balls into hubs or to climb on bars. This was the first competition in a while because Covid-19 had canceled the last two robotics seasons. The Iron Kings (our team name) went to their first competition in two seasons. None of us have ever been to a competition because the team used to be full of seniors and since they canceled the last two seasons, the seniors have gone off to college. With all the new members not going to a competition it got a little hard. But the Iron Kings surged on and even though we had a few mishaps, like our wood base breaking, we still had a good time. The time we have between the competition we just had and the one we have the week of the 24th will be spent mostly on fixing problems with our bot that we discovered we had during our competition. We will be short on time but we should have enough to perform way better than we have been in our last and first competition. We also have had experience driving it at the last competition so we should have better maneuvering skills.
We had a big change in the way we do our team. We have invited Logansport schools over to our team so they have a chance to participate in robotics since their team was abolished due to funding issues. We have mostly freshmen with no seniors and a very small number of sophomores and juniors. This contributes to our team not having a lot of experience and not having guidance from any upperclassmen. We had to play it by ear. With Covid-19, a lot of teams are in the same boat as we are because for two years there was no competition to compete in. So, a lot of teams probably also have a lot of inexperienced members and are also winging it and hoping it works out. This is a good opportunity to meet people from other schools. I can hear about what they are doing and how different it is from our school. With people coming from 2 different places, we have a better variety of ideas that we can use and build upon.
My name is Elijah Beard. I am currently a Junior at Lewis Cass Jr-Sr High School. I like working with technology and love listening to Hard Rock and...
