On Thursday, April 10, the Beaver County Robo Sumo Competition was held at Freedom Area Middle School in the gymnasium. Robo Sumo is a competition in which teams build a robot and have their robot fight each other. First to knock their opponent’s robot off the board two out of three times wins!

“I think it’s a very good opportunity to not only learn about robotics, but to learn from the other students and really see how innovative you can be,” Cooper Valko, sixth-grade Robo Sumo participant, said. “Robo Sumo can help you learn that it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s honestly better because then you can learn from them, and I feel that it can really correlate with things in math or science,” Valko said.

               “It was my first year, so I learned a bit of how to code. I also learned different ways that you could build your robot to make it work good,” Jameson McGowan, sixth-grade Robo Sumo participant, said. “My favorite thing [about Robo Sumo] is all the different possibilities for all the different robots you could make, and there’s nearly endless opportunities, and you can just get a lot of ideas.”               “I like building the robot,” Lincoln Hoover, sixth-grade Robo Sumo participant, said. 

Lincoln Hoover has been participating in Robo Sumo for three years, and this year, his group won the third-place trophy. This group included Lincoln Hoover, Cooper Valko, Jameson McGowan, Lucas Miller, and Lucas Schomburg. Lincoln Murphy, a seventh-grade Robo Sumo participant, placed first in the Robo Sumo competition this year.

            Robo Sumo has taught kids not only about academics but also about important life lessons.