MISSOULA – One robot’s trip to Calgary is already accounted for, but the operators might need some help getting to Alberta.
“So right now we are raising money for our trip to Calgary we are building a robot so that costs a lot of money. We have that mostly covered but right now we are mostly focusing on lodging and actually paying a bus to ship us over,” Sentinel High School junior Braeden Hunt said.
This isn’t the first time the Missoula Robotics Team 3216 has made the trip to the tournament and they hope to build off last years performance to win the whole thing this year.
“In years past we have made it to quarterfinals in the Canada regionals last year we were able to make it to semifinals which is the furthest we have ever come,” Hunt added.
“We were one match win away from qualifying for the world championships so we were pretty pumped about that and we were hoping to get all the way this year.”
The team believes they have built on their solid finish from last year, made a few changes and are ready to win the whole thing.
“This year is the first year we have ever really CATed our entire robot before we built it and we were also able to fix all the mistakes we made in our elevator that we did last year. It was a little unstable but this year we increased our design we beefed it up and its working much better,” Hunt said.
3216 will be the only Montana representative at the tournament and while other teams might have more resources, that doesn’t affect their championship aspirations
“It means a lot to Montana kids we are competing against like preparatory colleges out of California and we are able to beat them and out engineer them which is amazing seeing that we have an opportunity like this in small town USA,” Hunt said.
The team is made up of high school kids from all over Missoula. Click here if you would like to donate to their cause.
Reporting by Connor McCauley for MTN News
