The Mount Vernon school board took a short field trip during their meeting Monday night, leaving the high school library to head down to the PAC Lobby. They made the move to watch a presentation by the high school robotics team.

Principal Steve Brand requested the robotics program present to the board after team 85B won at state. The program, led by coach Tiffany. Chatman and their mentor Troy who used to compete in robotics himself, is hoping for more support from the district as it grows.

In the PAC Lobby, the students set up their robot and showed the board what it could do. Board members and people attending the meeting watched as the students explained how they built the robots and what it takes to compete.

“I think the meeting was a good way to show our knowledge,” Porter Chatman said. “We want to be like the Mercedes turbo-hybrid era in F1, just straight dominance.”

Porter Chatman, a driver and builder for the program, helped lead the presentation. Even though Chatman wasn’t on the winning state team, he has been a big part of the program all year. He said it was important for the board to see the robots in person to understand the true complexity of the robots.

After the demonstration, the program transitioned to talking about the building and programming side of robotics. Matthew Bany, a programmer for the team, explained the autonomous period and the challenges that come with it. The autonomous period is a section of the match where the robot has to move without any input from the driver using a coding language known as c++.

“Especially in this game, autonomous is really important,” Bany said. “The current meta of this game is heavily reliant on autonomous, because the strategy is currently to just win autonomous and then just turn into Ryan Blaney on defence”

Bany  and Chatman both mentioned that as our program grows they will need more support. As the program slowly grows, and the parts slowly get more and more outdated they will need more and newer parts to stay competitive.

After their success at state, 85B is preparing for nationals next week before representing Iowa at Worlds in April. The competition is huge, with more than 12,000 teams in Vex Robotics. Only the top 800 teams, including 85B, get to compete at the world level, making it one of the most selective events in student engineering.