By Riley Thompson and Wyatt Phebus
The Bonners Ferry High School FIRST Robotics Team, 2130 Alpha Plus, is raring to go for our 18th year of participation in the FIRST Robotics Competition. The theme of the competition this year is Crescendo, which reflects FIRST’s focus on music and performing arts in 2024.
The first challenge in our team’s path this year will be the Regional competition held at the Ford Idaho Center in Nampa, Idaho, and if we win, the next stop will be the World competition in Texas.
None of this would be possible without our devoted high school team members, our aspirational middle school team members, and our generous, patient mentors. Additionally, we have an amazing amount of community support, and our program would not be possible without our amazing sponsors and the funds we make from our community donations.
The 2023-24 season has been an interesting one for Alpha+, starting at the first meeting in the fall of 2023. Students learned some website design skills in HTML, as well as participating in a mock competition kickoff, where they learned the ins and outs of a game, brainstormed ideas and presented those ideas to their peers. This season’s kickoff started slow for Alpha Plus, but slowly we began to increase our tempo.
We finished our flat bot and soon after began work on our main robot, Ringo. Drafting was time consuming but once we finished drafting, building went wonderfully.
Alpha+ is excited to head to this year’s competition, March 20-23 in Nampa. We will be competing March 22-23 against teams from California, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Canada.
We greatly appreciate all our donors, sponsors, community, and mentors in their continued support in our conquest to go to Worlds. You can follow along with us on our Facebook page FIRST Team 2130 or by going to https://www.thebluealliance.com/ and searching for the Idaho Regional competition to see the games being broadcast.
