The Mid-Prairie Robotics team is making big moves, hosting their first ever competition last month and looking toward state qualifying this month.

Mid-Prairie were the hosts for a competition held at the high school on January 24th. Robotics coach and teacher Teresa Coleman says that team turnout was good, with 18 teams showing up out of the 34 teams in Mid-Prairie’s region. The team competes in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition. Each season, FIRST reveals a new game to be played. Teams must collaborate and work together, following a set of rules and regulations, to build a robot to compete in that game against other schools and teams.

Coleman says being on the robotics team teaches several important skills that participants can take beyond the classroom. “They have to communicate with a team, so this isn’t an individualized thing. You’ve gotta talk to each other on the team and organize it. You have to debate, whose idea is better, so they’ve got to do some accommodating for people of other ideas and what not. They’ve got programming skills that they’ve got to learn, they’ve got engineering concepts that they have to go through, and they have just that teambuilding and ‘hey, you’re not going to to get it your way all the time.’”

The robotics team is made up of six members, including freshmen Archer Herteen, Jensen Sorrell, Chase Clark, Alex Conrad, and Landon Hough, and junior Eli Conrad. State qualifiers will be held February 14th at West High School in Iowa City.