NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The North Kansas City Robotics Team is headed to an international competition.
Mamadou Seck, a senior who's been on the team four years, described how he got recruited.
"A big scary dude kind of told me, 'Hey, you look like you'll have a lot of fun taking them apart and then putting them back together.' So, I said, 'Sure. I'll join and destroy things and put them back together,'" he said.
Hanging out with the @NKCSchools STING-R Robotics Team! They’re headed to the world competition next month & showing me what their robot can do. 🐝🐝🐝 @STEMKC @FIRSTKCRobotics
Catch the story on @41actionnews at 10! pic.twitter.com/gy5KVEaJgB
— Dia Wall (@DiaWall) March 27, 2018
This is the third time the NKC STING-R crew has qualified for the world competition in its five years. Each team competes regionally to earn a slot, then they battle it out on the big stage to earn points and hopefully, the title. 30 kids are on the North KC team. They only had six weeks to design and build their robot.
Tucker Kreisler is at the controls during competition and explained that, "We're picking up the yellow power cubes and there's a spot in the side of the drive station wall called the exchange where we would feed the boxes to our human player and she would put them in the vault to use as power-ups throughout the match."
Viet Nguyen, the technician, said his job is, "To see if something goes wrong and try to fix it. However, usually nothing goes wrong during the game so I just sit there and look pretty."
Two team members use gaming joysticks to control the robot. It can move forward, backward, spin, pick up boxes, move up, move down and throw boxes too. The best part is the kids built the entire thing from scratch.
The team will compete with 600 other teams, including Independence and Lee's Summit West, in Houston April 18-21.
