On Friday, March 8, members of the Red River Robotics team traveled to Oklahoma City to compete in the qualifying rounds of the First Robotics competition. Four students from Bray-Doyle had a hand in helping the Red River Technology Center to a tenth-place finish among the 62 teams competing. Bray Doyle seniors Mark Kilbourn and Justin Miller traveled to Oklahoma City for the event, while senior, Dalton Whitehead and junior, Wesley Saltsman helped in the building of the robot.

“We (Miller, Whitehead and Kilbourn) got to be a part of the building process last year and liked it a lot,” Kilbourn said. “This year we actually got to go down on to the floor and be a part of it and that was insane.”

The students are first given a task for their robots to achieve and then allowed to create their robots with given parts and told to use extra parts from their technology center schools in a six-week period. After the robots are created each team can not touch their robot until the day of the competition.

“Our task was that they had these big inflatable ball and you had to put the balls into these stations from two feet to eight feet high,” Kilbourn said. “Then to be able to hold the balls there you had to be able to put a hatch pin in there to hold the ball in the cargo area. It took a lot of work for us to get it just right.”

Each team has four members from two drivers, a human player and a drive coach. Each member of the team had certain responsibilities for their team to be successful. One driver controls the wheels, while the other controls the arm mechanism. The human player places the discs or balls into the loading stations for the robots to use. The drive coach is usually a mentor or instructor to help in case things go wrong. Kilbourn took on the task of the human player, and Miller was one of the drivers. The two Bray seniors, said they enjoyed the hands-on experience in different ways.

“It was really fun being one of the drivers,” Miller said. “It was a great experience being down there and being a part of it all.”

Kilbourn agreed with his classmate’s thoughts saying that it was a very intense experience.

“There’s two alliances going up against each other with three robots for each,” Kilbourn said. “So, scouting the other robots is very important for our alliance to do well. If we get a ball in the cargo area it was five points and if we put a hatch on the cargo area it was ten points and the higher you went the more points you got. So, it was important for us in the quarter-finals to get good robots that could help our team get more points.”

In the middle of all of the chaos of the competition Kilbourn said his and Miller’s familiarity with one another was crucial in their success.

“Since we have been playing sports together since we were little we knew how to communicate better,” Kilbourn said. “We were far away from one another so had to rely on our communication and we have developed on that over the years.”