Students build ‘bots, friends at STEM camp

BONNERS FERRY — Bonners Ferry High School robotics team First Team Alpha 2130+ welcomed 30 young students for STEM activities, robot building, friendship building and learning at last week’s robotics camp.

The kids arrived early Monday morning to the “BOT Cave” at the back of the middle school where they were met by 12 enthusiastic team mentors who would spend eight hours a day for the next four days mentoring and guiding them through a variety of activities.

Among these activities were paper airplane building, marshmallow and spaghetti towers, catapult building, an egg drop and straw rocket building. JacobGarrison the middle school FLL coach, mentor and teacher, was also a guest speaker.

Campers finished off the week with the “human player” game, which robotic team members describe as a kid version of the robotics game. The campers used the Lego Mindstorm Robot Inventor to build and program bots to compete in a round robin competition that was held Thursday afternoon and attended by parents, siblings, grandparents and others.

This years camp was directed by team member Kaylee McCabe and had team members Grace Hopkins, Sadie Newhouse, Matthew McCabe, Wyatt Blackmore, Zach Callos, Jace Thompson, Colton Hubbell, Hayden Hazdovac, Cory Clairmont, Thomas Hubbell and Malia Barry leading teams. The 30 kids were divided into six teams of five for various daily camp competitions and the final robot competition.

The camp was completely student-run from planning, inviting camp participants, to building and designing a game for the team's robots to compete all while keeping the kids involved and learning throughout the week, robotics team members wrote in a press release.

If you have a child ages 14 and up interested in learning more about the robotics team please reachout to First Team Alpha+ 2130 Facebook page or email at 2130alphaplus@gmail.com.