Some of the top young minds from the area will be heading to Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 30, to face tough competition at the National Science Bowl.
A team from Bonham Middle School took first place in the regional competition in January at the Pantex Regional Middle School Science Bowl, to secure the chance to compete at a national level.
After about 10 hours of head-to-head rounds and tough competition, Bonham Middle School Team 1 won the Regional Science Bowl held at Amarillo’s AmTech Career Academy to advance to the prestigious national finals, being held April 30-May 4.
Then in April, Bonham students scored another big win — at a robotics state championship.
According to science teacher Kimberly Irvin, “Last week was the last weekend for robotic competition, GEARS, at Texas Tech University, in which our team went up against 30 plus teams, and Preston Jideofor was the first-place winner.”
“Basically, you design a little robot that has to complete as many tasks as it can in two minutes,” Irvin said. “And each task is worth a certain amount of points. You do three different rounds and they add all the scores together, and in that we got first place.”
Irvin explained that Texas Tech hosts the GEARS robotics competition state championship, and the winners go to the National Science Bowl in Washington, D.C.
The Bonham robotics teams competed against others from across the state in the GEAR competition, which is a hands-on STEM tournament at Texas Tech, where schools design, build, and program autonomous LEGO robots to solve complex, themed missions.
The program aims to inspire the next generation of engineers by fostering technical skills, teamwork and creative problem-solving in a high-energy, competitive environment.
The first-place robotics team, which also won the Pinnacle Award, consisted of Preston Jideofor, Erin Jideofor and Cayden Garcia. The Programming Award went to the Bonham team with Wesley Perkins, Levi Lusby, Andrew Atkins. The other two teams that qualified to compete at the state competition were Creed Wright, Cyrus Cox, and Bennett Moore; and Noah Galbreath, Landon Chim, Ximimg Zhang, and Tarun Aludandi.
“It was cool for Bonham, because we had four teams advance to the state (level), and we’ve never had that before, and then one of our teams got the programming award,” Irvin said, beaming. “Another one of our teams got fourth place, and we got first place and got the Pinnacle award, which is the highest score in the rounds for the day.”
Irvin said that they were very proud because teams come in from all over Texas after qualifying to compete.
According to Jideofor, they were able to have the robot collect all the batteries. The main thing was to grab batteries, assemble satellites and get them on the tall station.
“Not everyone can get them all, but you’re supposed to get as many points as you can in two minutes,” Jideofor said. He said that he programmed the robot on the computer and then sent the coding into the robot. Then he pressed the button, and it goes through the motions that are programmed.
Jideofor said he was surprised to get first place, but he did expect to get in the final four top winners. Many of the students on the robotics team for the GEAR competition are also on the Science Bowl team, with both going to the nationals at Washington, D.C.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Bonham students notch another win before National Science Bowl
Reporting by Nell Williams, Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
