Four Kemmerer Junior Senior High School students — eighth-grader Katherine McAffee and sophomores Carlie Ogle, Kaylee Miller and Maribel Garcia — are celebrating after placing first in the 2022 Wyoming State VEX Robotics Championship on Saturday, March 5, in Gillette. 

The Kemmerer team, in an alliance with the top-ranked Gillette team, won the state title. The four students from Gillette had researched the Kemmerer team online and were impressed when they saw their robot in person at the tournament. Similarly, Kemmerer’s Miller had researched the teams participating in the state tournament and predicted accurately who would do well in the qualifying matches.

The Kemmerer team, however, did not rank well after the qualifying matches, during which the two-robot alliances are selected randomly for each match. Despite this, the Gillette team realized Kemmerer’s potential to complement their robot’s strengths during the tournament matches and selected them over other teams as their alliance partner for the championship tournament. During the few minutes between the qualifying rounds and tournament, the two teams strategized on respective roles during the two-minute matches, which took them to the top.

“We lost our experienced robot programmer from last year in mid-January, just as programming was needed to operate the robot,” coach Arvid Aase said. “Maribel, a friend of Kaylee’s who joined the team after Christmas, stepped up and programmed the robot in less than two weeks. She really worked hard to learn it quickly and has continued to improve the program since then. They pulled together and worked well as a team. We are proud of them.”

Aase and Mark Ristau serve as coaches for the Kemmerer robotics program. Aase said he has previously coached the team for four years and was asked to help Ristau, who is in his first year of coaching robotics, learn the basics of the program. Aase is employed at Fossil Butte National Monument and Ristau is a full-time employee in the maintenance department at Kemmerer Junior Senior High School.

“This program is an inspiration for young people who may want to become engineers,” Ristau said. “If I had had this program when I was in school, today I would be working for NASA building robots to go to the moon.”

VEX Robotics is a program for elementary through university students, and a subset of Innovation First International. The VEX Robotics competitions and programs are managed by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation. In April 2018, VEX Robotics Competition was named the largest robotics competition in the world by Guinness World Records.

The competition is played on a square field. Two alliances comprised of two teams each, one team signified by red license plates and the other blue, compete in matches consisting of a 15-second autonomous period (100% programmed movement), followed by a 1 minute and 45 second driver-controlled period.

The object of the game is to attain a higher score than the opposing alliance team by their individual robots scoring rings, moving mobile goals to alliance zones, and by elevating on platforms at the end of a match. Various points are assigned for each goal with the winner being the team that achieves the most points overall. The competitions can be viewed at http://youtube.con/watch?v=H8XcvADUXTE.

The alliance of Kemmerer and Gillette were rewarded by each receiving an invitation to attend the World Robotics Tournament in Dallas, May 5-7. To attend the tournament, where the best teams come from all over the world, the Kemmerer team will need to raise funds. Expenses for the trip will range between $6,000 to $7,000, which includes hotel rooms, meals and an entry fee of $1,500. Half of the entry fee has to be paid within three weeks of receiving the invitation, meaning very soon, and the second half within six weeks.

Abby Miller, Kaylee’s mom, who had acted as chaperone for the girls and traveled with the team to the state tournament, volunteered to head up the fundraising effort and those interested in donating can contact the team via email at kjshsrobotics@gmail.com.