The robotics team after their competition at ASU on Oct. 31.

BIANCA GARCIA – Hoof Prints Staff

This year’s BEST award goes to Buffalo Island Central. This year’s BEST award goes to Buffalo Island Central. This year’s BEST award goes to Buffalo Island Central. This year’s BEST award goes to Buffalo Island Central. This year’s BEST award goes to…West Memphis Christian School.

Disappointment, anger and the feeling of shock runs through the minds of the members of the BIC robotics team. This year at the Crowley’s Ridge Best Robotics competition, BIC was awarded second place in the BEST competition for the first time in four years.

“I don’t think Mr. Brummett was too happy with the outcome,” Timothy Neal said.

This year the competition’s theme was Total Recall and the goal was to program a robot to differentiate defective parts from good parts. The BIC robotics team was supplied with kits to build the robots from the Crowley’s Ridge hub.

To team members, robotics isn’t taken lightly. The team works three days a week, four hours a day, for six weeks until the Crowley’s Ridge Robotics competition. The competition consists of an oral presentation, showing and performing the task of the robot and having a display booth and engineering notebook.

During the eight hour competition, inconsistencies within the game arose. “I think we got cheated on some awards such as Founder’s award, which is given to the robot that can do all aspects of the game, and our robot can do every little aspect of the game,” Nathan Whitlow said. “The team that won, I don’t recall them doing all the aspects, just one half of the game.”

Also, the team had to correct the judges several times on the rules.  “Some of the scores were higher and our score was lower than they should have been,” Timothy said.

Although some felt like they got cheated, they still won some prestigious awards. They received the Top Gun award which is awarded to the team with the most points in any round, which was won by Mark Stone. They also won the Robust award which is given to the robot that has the least amount of construction in the pit.

The team would have enjoyed first place in the BEST award, but second place still lets them participate in the regionals in Fort Smith on December 10.

“Like Mr. Brummett said, once you have a team as powerful as we are and consistently doing well, they can’t always give us the upper hand,” Nathan said.

“Our robotics team did very well at Jonesboro,” Mr. Steve Brummett said. “Although they didn’t get first as they usually do, we learned some valuable lessons and we will do much better at Fort Smith.”