The Powell High School Robotics Club competed in the Butte FTC Robotics State Qualifier on Nov. 17.

All four Powell teams went to Butte to compete in their first qualifying event of this year’s season.

This season’s challenge is called Rover Ruckus. Each match has a 30-second pre-programmed period and then a 2-minute driver-controlled period. During this time, the robot has to complete different tasks to earn different amounts of points. The tasks can vary from raising and lowering itself from a large “lander” to moving and picking up blocks and balls.

“There’s going to be a lot of challenging mechanical tasks involved in building a robot that is fast  and precise and sturdy,” senior Alan Merritt said. “It’s still very early in the season so the robot is not yet complete and we have a lot left to do.”

Since this was the first competition for Powell this season, things were bound for improvement and this was an opportunity to find these problems.

“Our biggest challenge was mechanical failures and problems with the code,” freshman Gus Miller said.

Robots aren’t the only thing competitors have to deal with. They also have to deal with the people from 34 teams as well as their own teammates.

“It is fun, but very crazy,” sophomore Madelyn Horton said. “It can be difficult to keep up with everybody and all the teams. To sum it up, trying to keep track of everything is like counting a thousand cats that look exactly alike.”

And due to the alignments of events, the competition took place on the same day as Winter Formal. This meant some team members had to make a decision, leaving some teams a member or two down for their first competition.

“This was a very exciting first competition,” freshman Brianna Evelo said. “It did not go as well as planned but we only had one experienced member on the team.”

Team 3188 ended up in 4th place, 10731 got the third place Think Award, 6437 got the third place Connect Award and 10541 took the second place Control Award.