Robotics celebrates new season

The Aledo High School Robotics team hosted a 14-school kick-off event, giving organizational tips, model building pointers, and coding demonstrations to other north Texas public and private schools. The event culminated with a world-wide live reveal of what this season’s robotics challenge will be for all schools with competitive robotics clubs.

Evan Christensen huddled with 20325 Maximum Resistance teammates to look over computer codes they plan to explain to other teams.

“The coding allows a robot to make specific moves and tells it where to be on the field,” Christensen said, pointing to a screen filled with hundreds of letters, symbols and numbers. “In competition, the robot has to go to specific locations and complete the required tasks.”

Other Aledo teams giving demonstrations included 13811 High Voltage, 5655 Circuit Breakers, 9161 Overload, and 20325 Maximum Resistance. The numbers with robotics team names indicate the group’s longevity.

Teams plan their own strategy, design their own robots, choose the positions and function of members, and solve analytical problems during the building and competition of their robots. Faculty supervision provides minimal restrictions, giving the students opportunities not only to use their programming and building knowledge, but freedom to learn leadership, accountability and teamwork.

Randy Bruton is one of the school’s faculty coaches.

“The new robotics challenge will drop at 11 o'clock on Youtube for a world-wide reveal of what this season’s challenge will be,” Bruton said. “This is exciting. This is the start of the season.”

Aledo High School will travel to numerous robotics competitions and will host three competitions this year, with the first on Oct. 26.

Although robots may bring to mind Star Wars characters or TV robot smash-up shows, the units students build and operate will perform complicated, detailed tasks. A common slogan you may see on shirts at robotics competitions is, “This is not Battlebots.”

Many schools produce one robotics team, while Aledo has several. The first Aledo robotics team, 6566 Circuit Breakers, began in 2012. As popularity grew, 9161 Overload, and 13811 High Voltage were added in 2017, and the newest, 20325 Maximum Resistance, was formed in 2021.