Bayfield High School engineering students’ hard work paid off last week at the 2023 Colorado TSA (Technology Student Association) Conference, where the robotics team took second place.

“I teach engineering at the high school,” said Bayfield High School instructor Brian McDonagh. “We have career and technical student organizations like an after-school club, where students make a bunch of projects and learn particular skills. Then every year we go to Denver and compete against all other high schools of the state.”

According to the Colorado TSA website, the guidelines of the competition included designing a robot that had to do with home inspection, including questions like “What aspects of a home inspection could be improved using a robot?” and “What potential issues could be identified/checked or quantified using electronic sensors?”

Three of Bayfield High School’s 10th graders rose to the challenge and designed a robot meant to roll into and inspect spaces in houses that might prove difficult for a human. The students have been working on the design since September.

“They designed a robot to inspect crawl spaces,” McDonagh. “The try to make them (the competition) industry relevant. The idea is when you buy a house, you get an inspector in and sometimes crawl spaces can be dangerous or difficult to get to. So they designed a robot with camera lights and sensors for different gases for moisture, humidity, temperature, which then relay that information back to the operator.”

The students then had to demonstrate their robotic creation.

“During the competition, they set up a little mock crawl space where they demonstrated the robot’s capabilities,” McDonagh said. “Then they wrote up a portfolio and submitted it. There was an interview section as well.”

McDonagh is also proud of the other robotics teams from Bayfield High School that competed, as well as the other Bayfield STEM teams that competed in other categories last week.

“Most of our kids got to the semifinal rounds,” he said.

Students also competed in coding, designing board games, photographic technology, designing a video game and other teams that competed in the crawl space robots competition.

Bayfield High School sophomores Hunter Carroll, Jack Davis and Edward Herrera took home the second place prize at state for their crawl space robot. Bradley Foutz, Donald Ledvina, Joseph Lybarger, Elliot Willie and Kaden Wood placed eighth for their video game design; Payton Cordova was given 10th place for his photographic technology piece; and robotics team Christopher Frazee, Andrew Russell and Scott Taylor got 10th place for their design.

“We're particularly chuffed (pleased) because there's a lot of STEM-specific high schools on the Front Range who specialize in this – very affluent communities for little Bayfield to not just hang with them, but get a podium place. We're really proud of our students,” McDonagh said.

molsen@durangoherald.com