DeWitt Perry Has Highest Ranked Middle School Botball Team in the World

The DeWitt Perry Robotics Club traveled to Norman, Oklahoma July 6-10 to attend the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) and Global Botball Competition. Perry sent two teams and 20 students.

At the end of the competition Perry was the highest ranked Middle School in the World as well as the only

Middle School in the Top Ten overall in the world.  In addition the students received an award for their performance as a group on the robotics achievement test, which is a difficult test on robotics and physics knowledge. 

View photos here.

The Perry students have been working extremely hard for the last 2 1/2 months to design, build, program, test and document two autonomous robots per team to compete in the competition. When most students were enjoying their summer vacation from school these students came in 4-5 days a week during the summer to build robots! The competition is NOT broken in to middle school and high school divisions and our Perry teams had to compete against many high schools, charter and technical school.

GCER is a complete conference on robotics and students got to hear professionals and college professors from the field of robotics speak to them about their current research and future opportunities in robotics. In addition the students wrote and presented papers of their own and presented them to their peers. In addition the conference played host to the global Botball competition. They also got to go on a field trip to the Omniplex Science Museum in Oklahoma City. There were 60+ teams from around the world, including teams from Austria, China, and the Middle East.

Earlier in the year the students took second place overall at the Oklahoma regional, first place in documentation and received several judges' choice awards.

The team would like to thank Gerry Charlebois and Advanced Academic Service for their help and support.