Bazinga Bots ‘connect’ at championship

The Bazinga Bots, which is made up of The Dalles High School students Quinn Farquharson, Preston Klindt, Rebecca Stiles, Caelen Curtiss, Lauren Jubitz and Azure Compton, had a popular booth at The Dalles Main Street Summerfest where they allowed kids to drive robots.

With the award comes a berth in the Super Qualifiers on Feb. 13-14 in Hillsboro.

The Bazinga Bots were one of three robotics teams from The Dalles to advance as well as one from Sherman County.

Sa-BOT-Tage, which includes Spencer Honald, Tyler Vassar and Bill Burns, was given the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award and was also on the winning alliance with Steelhead of Hood River Valley in the robot game competition.

“They built an excellent robot,” Wasco County 4-H Educational Program Assistant Lu Seapy said of Sa-BOT-Tage. “It was amazing what they did.”

The competition took place in an 18-inch cube where robots executed a variety of tasks from moving balls and blocks to releasing levers, climbing ramps and hanging from a bar. Teams competed in alliances of two randomly chosen teams for five matches.

The first 30 seconds of each match was all autonomous. Competitors then used an Xbox controller to move their robots around the board in the final two minutes.

At the conclusion of the matches the top four teams chose two additional teams to compete with them in a best of three semifinal, with the winners advancing to the finals. In addition to the robot competition, teams also vied for awards based on interviews and submitted engineering notebooks focused on community outreach, gracious professionalism, technical innovation and mentoring.

Seapy’s own team, KillaBots, also moved on to Super Qualifiers. Stephen Ganders, Jacob Stansbury, Rey Aviluz, Justin Eiesland, Jordan Dexter and Jacob Bartholomew advanced by having the most points in league play of any The Dalles team.

Binary Chaos, of The Dalles, reached semi-finals of the competition but did not advance to the Super Qualifiers.

Despite finishing 23rd out of 24 teams after their first five matches, The Shermanators were picked to be in an alliance with Occam’s Razor and advanced to finals of the robot competition.

Seniors Logan Raczkowski, Wyatt Stutzman, Ken Earl, Alex Fields, Hunter Grenvik and Garak Casper helped their HRVHS partner defeat Steelhead in the second match of the best of three series.

However, Steelhead took the third match to win the tournament. “We are really lucky to be moving on,” Raczykowski said. “Without Occam’s Razor our season would be over.”

The Shermantors coach Dezi Remington was proud of her guys, who are one of the few teams that don’t have a mentor.

“They do 100 percent of the work themselves,” she said. “I’ve got creative kids. It’s fun to work with them.”

Dufur’s The Ranger Bots and South Wasco’s CogNation also competed in the Mid-Columbia and Central Oregon Championship.

Remington noted this has been a difficult year for teams due to a change in the technology platform and programming language.

Jeff Stiles, coach of the Bazinga Bots, hopes their best is ahead of them.

In four competitions, the Bazinga Bots have used a different robot, each one a little better than the last. After Super Qualifiers is the state championship in Portland on Feb. 27-28.

The Western Regional Tournament, which features teams from 13 different states, is in March. The Bazinga Bots qualified last year.

“Historically, Bazinga Bots doesn’t do well at this time of year,” Stiles said. “We usually lose the first competition and then come back and smoke them in the second.”

Worlds will then take place in St. Louis. The Shermanators have been there before. Raczykowski, as a Dean’s List Finalist, and Stutzman were two of three kids chosen last year to represent Oregon.