Students take on Botball Challenge

Students from Townsend Elementary School participates in the Mid-Del Elementary Botball Challenge Saturday at the Learning Services Center. Photo by Jeff Harrison

By Jeff Harrison
Midwest City Beacon

Students competed in the Mid-Del Elementary Botball Challenge Saturday morning at the Mid-Del Learning Services Center (former Del Crest Middle School).

Students worked together with classmates to program an autonomous robot or bot to complete a variety of tasks. The event included seven challenges as well as a computer debugging station and advanced coding challenge.

Students received a button for each of the seven challenges they completed. Teams that completed all seven challenges received a banner and additional button.

Schwartz Elementary, Soldier Creek Elementary, Townsend Elementary, and Del City Elementary each completed all the challenges.

About 140 students from nine of the district’s 13 elementary schools participated in the event.

“I think we have a lot more parents and kids out here,” said Krissy Johnson, Mid-Del Schools Science/STEM Instructional Facilitator on Saturday. “We have a lot more involvement from our middle school and high school robotics teams.”

Middle and high school students helped judge the competitions and encouraged younger students to continue with robotics.

“They showed elementary kids how they can take these skills to the middle and high school level,” Johnson said.

Students from Schwartz Elementary take part in the Botball Challenge. Photo by Jeff Harrison