Wheels Turning as NextGen Robotics Creators Compete

110 high school teams at DECC reveal creative minds, imaginations and know-how for the future.

Football may have its Super Bowl Week, but it is not alone.
The countdown is on in Duluth for super clashes between mechanical beings.

The floor of the DECC Thursday was a sea of metal frames, wheels, mechanical limbs and electricity.

It’s officially known as a FIRST Robotics competition. One hundred and ten high school teams are competing to make it to Houston for the championship.

Things kicked off with teams doing safety checks, fine-tuning, working out any glitches, and practicing for qualifying matches.

Teams, such as Mesabi East’s ‘Messy Bees,’ did not know until seven weeks ago what the tasks and challenges were, and what their robot would have to do.

“You have your robot, you can pick up a note and launch it up into the speaker, or you can roll it into the amp,” said Colton Matvey, handling media duties for his ‘Messy Bees.’

“And like at the end, you can hang on a chain, and someone throws the note onto the microphone, and you can get points like that. Or if you can’t go on to the chain, you can just go into the area,” said Colton.

In the true spirit of the weekend and getting there, the ‘Messy Bees’–a rookie team–got some help along the way from veteran teams, including Marshall School in Duluth, and Babbitt’s ‘Iron Mosquitos.’

The gathering is the fourth largest of its kind in the nation. And although most of the DECC’s other competitions have involved aspiring athletes hoping to move up, organizers say that at this event, most of the competitors can actually see their dreams come true.

“This is huge, this is huge. And every single student there, every single team member is going to be able to turn ‘Pro’,” said Doug Frisk, Co-Chair of the Regional Planning Committee.

“Because, we’re training them to be engineers, or we’re training them to be media specialists. And they’re all going to be able to go straight into whatever career that they want because they’ve had experience for up to four years, building robots, developing relationships with the business community,” Frisk said.

Known as the “Double DECCer,” the event is free and open to the public and welcomes spectators.

Qualifications start Friday morning at nine and run to the dinner hour.

There are more qualifications Saturday, and the playoffs start at 1:30.

As Frisk puts it–the event shows that “nerds are cool.”