The Steel Mustangs, the award winning MSHS robotics team, practices every week on Tuesdays through Thursdays, from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm in the engineering room of the SILC building. The team opens up many opportunities for people to try out new things, and together, the team members build robots.
The Steel Mustangs gives everyone hands-on practice with the robot and the ability to try out different things to help improve the robot. Head coder Edward Buckley (12) enjoys adding new parts to the robot. “We had a Limelight for forever; but last year, I was the first one to put it on,” Buckley said.
The team also added an AprilTag, a QR code that is detected by the Limelight and auto lock which works along with the Limelight to help the robot in competition.
Each year, the robotics teams are given a challenge for competition. “Last year was a shooting game,” Buckley said. “It was a note to pick up and shoot into a thing, and we could aim automatically, just press a button and aim at the AprilTag. And that was really nice.”
The robotics team offers many opportunities for students to learn about robotics, coding and form relationships. “If you join robotics, you’re going to be hands-on with the robot. You’re going to have real-life engineering experience,” captain Griffin Saulsbury (12) said. “And on huge teams, not even everybody goes to the competitions. But if you’re on our team, and you know you want to, anybody can go to the competitions. It’s definitely hands-on. Join any robotics team, if you’re interested, but specifically, Manitou is just such a fun one.”
The robotics team opens up the opportunity to go out and meet new people through competitions. “At competitions, we have to get the robot there, load it in, we have to prepare to compete. So we have to be able to set up our entire fit, and repair the robot on the fly when it eventually breaks,” Kent Colman (12) said. “So we have to go to each thing, every single one of those teams, ask them what their robot does, why they think their robot is effective, and stuff like that.”
The robotics team is open to students who don’t go to Manitou Springs High School. “The school I go to doesn’t have any clubs, so that’s one reason I come here for robotics, but the other reason is just, I really enjoy the smaller team aspect of this school,” Colman said. “So really, everyone gets to work on the robot very specifically, and work on a lot of the parts of the robot. I like the community aspect here in Manitou, there’s just a lot of interesting people to me, and a lot of interesting things to do.”
Colman believes that the robotics team is a way to be part of a new community with a lot of hands-on activities and great people to meet. “Just that, it’s a great experience for high schoolers to learn what it’s actually like to work on a large project that’s really their own. I mean, we’re taking a class, you have school projects that you’re graded on,” Colman said, “ but this, you are working on a project for multiple months, and you’re not just graded, it’s just really performance based on how well you did and what your goals are and what you want to do so it’s really your own.”
The robotics team is open to new people who would like to join. “I really love the community that’s in robotics and the challenge of engineering a whole robot from scratch. It just is really fun to me, which is a total nerd thing,” Saulsbury said, “but it’s super fun to be able to hang out with my friends and design this and travel. We’re going to Flagstaff in a few weeks, so that’s really fun. I have loved robotics so much my whole life.”
