Oct. 1, 2015
On a typical day, students don’t talk at length about their school’s robotics team, but that’s not the case at Cheyenne. Robotics is a “contact sport” and the competitive aspect of Robotics makes it a popular topic on campus. Robotics is all about competition and wanting to win just as any other sport. The difference is Robotics athletes aren't throwing, catching, or moving fast: the robots are. “Everything we do is kind of competitive,” stated Robotics Instructor Mr. Bowersox, “It’s who we are”.

Robotics is based in S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Recently, S.T.E.M. has changed to S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). It would be wrong to suggest that S.T.E.A.M. is what advances robotics. In reality, robotics advances S.T.E.A.M.

“It’s Science. It’s exciting! It’s Technology, computers, and programming. It’s  Engineering: it’s starting with a pile of aluminum and ending with a robot. It’s Math, the calculations,” Mr. Bowersox  confessed, “And the Arts: It’s the t-shirts, the banners, the advertising. That is all art.”

Building robots are not the only thing this team does. “You saw us build the FLL Tables for the elementary schools,” Mr. Bowersox pointed out. “We do a lot of volunteer work for the little kids, making sure that they can have robotics teams as well.”

Cheyenne’s Robotics team is scheduled to host the “Club Fire” for the Southern Nevada State Championship with around 30 to 35 teams coming out--half of them qualify for the championship at West Tech in January. In addition, they are promoting robotics all the time.

“In 160 countries around the world FIRST has over 83,000 teams with over half a million teams, but in the U.S. we have only thirty?” Mr. Bowersox explained; this is because “we’re not football, we’re not basketball, people don’t really know who we are or what we do.”
America for years now has been losing our technological edge--no, we have lost it. The year before President Bill Clinton mentioned how our country has seen some of the brightest people, how America had always created the best yet now we are losing to other countries like China and Japan. So, Clinton went to a man named Dean Kamen, the man who invented the Segway, who was a millionaire by age 15. Mr. Kamen founded FIRST, an international robotics society, and now, because of him, robotics has become worldwide.

“We’re the athletes of geek and nerd; they are both simply just ways of saying we’re smarter than you,” Mr. Bowersox boasted, “I don’t want to say that robotics will be in every school, but pretty soon everyone will see so much more of us.”

Robotics can give our schools and country the technological edge it needs to compete in a global world.