Asked how well he thought his club’s six-foot-tall, 120-pound robot would perform in an upcoming competition in Kansas City, Free State School High senior Wynn Feddema was unsure.

“We’ll see,” he says after thinking about it.

It’s not unlike how the group felt about last year’s robot, senior Anna Faust said, in the lead-up to the same annual tournament: the regional round of the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition. There’s no telling what other teams are packing, or which screws will come undone at the wrong time.

But Free State’s machine finished tenth out of 58 teams last year when the school returned to the world of robotics.

Richard Gwin/Journal World-Photo. From left: senior Wynn Feddema, junior Kalena Nichol, senior Zaq Moore and freshman David Gates work on the lifting arms on Free State High School's robot for the regional FIRST Robotics Competition in Kansas City.

Richard Gwin/Journal World-Photo. Free State junior Kalena Nichol, works on the robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Faust and Feddema not only helped build both bots, they helped rebuild Free State’s robotics club, which was dormant for several years. The club has almost doubled in size since the 2013-14 school year, and is ready to return to FIRST, a prestigious and international tournament. Top teams will be invited to the championship round in St. Louis in April.

“Now it’s a matter of trying to see that it continues,” Teresa Morgan, a special education teacher at Free State, said about the club she supervises. “I think we’re solid.”

Feddema and Faust both arrived at Free State in their sophomore year, having already developed an interest in robotics. Feddema experienced a FIRST competition while living in Colorado and wanted to get back to it, so he and Faust approached teachers and students while writing grant requests to get a group up and funded.

Out of that came a $3,000 gift from NASA and a group of other interested students. They first worked out of a math classroom, pushing desks and books out of the way every day, before moving into a space that was previously used for wood shop classes.

The club has also gone through a series of coaches in a short length of time. After last year’s coach left Free State for a new job, science teacher Brad Simon took over in August 2014. But shortly before the group began working on the robot for the FIRST competition, Simon, 53, died in December due to heart problems. Morgan was asked to lead the group the following month.

Initially students thought they couldn’t do it, Morgan said. “(Then) they had that moment where they all said they could do it. With the team members who are returning from last year… they were pretty determined.”

This year the group came up with a kind of forklift design, sans cockpit, for the remote-controlled robot, which does not yet have a name. Its wheels are outfitted with treads that allow it to move side to side.

The name of the game in the FIRST competition this year is recycling. Robots, working in teams in the early rounds, will have 180 seconds to move boxes onto a scoring platform and clean up pool noodles, which represent litter.

Teams had six weeks to build their machines, and as of Feb. 17 cannot put any more work into them until the tournament begins March 11. Many students at Free State spent 80 hours assembling the droid, with Feddema and Faust each giving around 100.

Feddema called that “very rough,” but he and others said they also got plenty of amusement out of their time together working with power tools and fiddling with wires.

“I made so many more friends,” Faust said. “A lot of people in this robotics club, I honestly probably wouldn’t have met or been friends with outside of it.”

The entire team will make the trip to Kansas City for the four-day competition against over 50 teams. Ultimately, they hope the robot will get them in the top half of the standings.

“I think we’ll score well,” Morgan said.