Anna Puderbaugh | Staff Writer

Hours of hard work and dedication were rewarded for the Robotics team when they received the prestigious Chairman’s Award at last week’s district competition.

The judges recognized the Robotics team for embodying desirable characteristics. “The Chairman’s Award is basically described as being a team that other teams should aspire to be,” said sophomore Imogen Horne.

This is just the beginning for the Robotics team. The team won the award at the district level but will advance to state and compete for it there. If they win at state, the Robotics team will advance to the worlds competition.

To win the award, the team wrote essays, crafted a presentation and presented it. “There are a lot of short essays as well as a long essay. There’s also a presentation, and I was a part of the presentation team as well as two other students,” said Horne.

The presentation was based around the team’s exemplary qualities. “It was about how we’re the ideal team and how we promote robotics and STEM in general,” said sophomore Chase Rivas.

The award didn’t come easy, however. The team put in many hours creating their presentation in addition to the time spent building their robot. The period of time that the team builds their robot, called “build season,” lasted for six weeks. Each student put in around 100 hours of work on the robot.

Work on the presentation and essays lasted four weeks. “We’ve been working on our Chairman’s presentation for four weeks now and we’ve been doing it every meeting which is around 3-4 times a week,” said Rivas.

All of this hard work, not to mention teamwork, was fruitful. The feeling of winning the award was amazing for the team. “We put a lot of hard work into it and it’s really awesome [to win] because it’s a group effort. Not only does it represent our team now but it represents our team that was run by alumni so it’s really awesome because we can all celebrate together,” said Rivas.

Put simply, Horne said, “[Winning] felt amazing.”

Not only is the award satisfying now, but it provides the team with motivation and momentum for their upcoming state competition. “It definitely motivates us and it’s proof that our team has actually been doing really well this year,” said Rivas.

“We’re going to keep practicing and keep building on it to hopefully improve for state,” said Horne.

The Robotics team competes in the state championship in Kokomo this weekend.