The Maize Robotics team went to a competition in Topeka at Seaman High School for a VEX Robotics Competition tournament this weekend. 

Seniors Jacob Shove, Cole Spar and Sam Bartlett took first in the competition out of 32 teams. Shove said he was very thrilled when they won.

¨It felt great because at the beginning of the year we started off real slow,¨ Shove said. ¨We did really well last year. It’s great to feel like your doing well again.¨ 

Engineering teacher Zach Helgeson said he was proud of his team after they won.

“It was really exciting and definitely a lot of fun to see their hard work pay off,” Helgesen said. “Our teams had some very ambitious designs from the very beginning, which some of them started all the way back in July building their robots, because they were building very complicated ambitious robots,” Helgeson said. “It’s been a long process to get them up to this point.”

The team has been working on this robot since the beginning of the year. 

“So our robotics team we have one big team but within there are individual teams that create their own robots. At the last competition we took four teams. One of our teams took first place overall in the tournament and we had another team place fourth out of 32 teams and they won the judges award as well,” Helgeson said.

In four weeks, the robotics team will be competing at the Kansas State Tournament of Champions. 

 ̈My favorite part about robotics is probably the feeling you get when you’ve worked really hard on a robot and it works out and it performs the way you built it to,¨ Shove said.