Robotics teams from Ronan High School and Ronan Middle School put forth good showings last weekend at the “FIRST” State Tournament at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Ronan students were part of the total 150 high school students and 330 middle school students from across the state who competed in this year’s tournament on Jan. 23-24. “FIRST” is a nonprofit organization that sponsors robotics competitions for teens, holding state, regional, and national tournaments across the country and world.

The Ronan High School team competed Friday in the FIRST Tech Challenge “Face Off”,  where teams use their robot to put as many hockey pucks into a scoring bucket as possible.

“Our team again had one of the best performing robots at the tournament,” Ronan High School Robotics adviser Jesse Gray said. 

At the finish of the rounds, RHS was ranked as the number nine seed in the tournament and the seventh seed overall after pairing, putting the team in position for a chance to win the tournament and go to nationals in Atlanta. The team battled hard but suffered a loss to the number two ranked team in the semi-finals.

Ronan High School’s team also took home the “Motivate” Award from Friday’s contest.

FIRST’s tournaments aim at teaching students professionalism along with technical skills. For example, the skills taught through the program have motivated Ronan senior Evan Waldron to take what he’s learned over the past two years in robotics and apply it to working on cell phone towers as he plans to attend Montana Tech in Butte next fall.

The Ronan middle schoolers competed in Saturday’s FIRST LEGO League tournament, where each team uses robots made from LEGO bricks to solve a two-part climate-themed challenge.

The middle school’s robotics team, had an extra item on their agenda. Not only did they have to build and program a LEGO robot for missions, they had to research their own local climate in Northwest Montana in addition to global climate and present their findings to a panel of judges from MSU’s College of Engineering. At the end of the 3 official rounds the team was officially ranked seventh out of 42 teams.

“The RMS Robotics team walked away with one years experience and next year they are setting their sights on being number one,” Ronan Middle School robotics adviser Jessica Johnson said.

This summer advisers Gray and Johnson are looking at the possibility of holding a robotics camp. Anyone interested in the summer program is asked to contact either of the advisers at their school.