08-04-2025
A robotics tournament in a power outage
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — As if the challenge of building and programming a completely autonomous robot weren't enough, hundreds of teams and thousands of students from across Oklahoma and Kansas had to complete preparations in the dark Saturday morning.
Regional Botball Organizer Steve Goodgame got an early phone call explaining the situation.
'I got a call about 5:30AM that the power was out,' he says. 'They said they were working on it.'
An overnight rainstorm cut power to the Centennial Building at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds.
Junior Botballer Presley Bolton and friends from Pratt, Kansas worked through morning overcast away from the dark interior of the building.
She admitted, 'It's kind of hard to code in the dark but we moved right next to the window.'
Two separate divisions, two different eras in history met in one building, the Age of AI and the Stone Age.
Junior Botball contestants worked on a series of challenges that included retrieving soda cans from a pre-arranged grid.
Senior Botball teams worked with two robots at a time preparing food in a simulated kitchen.
Practice was supposed to start at 8 a.m. for these first time competitors from Allen-Bowden south of Tulsa.
7th grader Jesse Whitlock explained, 'A major obstacle is probably that we crammed in a lot of the programming last minute.'
The same went for a team from Millwood Schools in OKC.
'We coded five times,' chuckles one member of the team.
'We've had to run it and re-run it,'
Organizers like Goodgame present different challenges each year, a course impossible to fully complete.
The only think lacking in this simulated kitchen happened to be a Stone Age staple.
'No open flames?,' we ask.
'No open flames here,' Goodgame agrees. 'In fact, no kitchen. No power.'
In the cave of the Centennial Building where light came from cell phone flashlights and laptop screens, robots on battery power and students on cold Poptarts solved the kinds of problems humankind has always faced, getting a meal ready fast with no heat or light.
Survive and move on.
The 2025 Regional Botball Challenge did get underway later Saturday, April 5th.
Winners from both divisions qualified for the World Botball Conference scheduled for early July 8th in Norman OK.
For more information on Saturday's event, click here.
For more information on the World Conference go to
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