Prior to Covid, the Powell Middle School robotics team was at the top, winning back-to-back state titles in 2018-2019. 

Then the sponsor left, participation dipped and the program struggled until 2021, when a new sponsor, Leon Miller, began rebuilding the program. When he left after last school year, another teacher, Kix Carter rose her hand to help lead a talented group of students eager to take the next step and get back to preeminence. 

“I said, Kix, if you bring the passion in the organization and the communication that you do every day in the classroom, we’re going nowhere but up,” Powell Middle Assistant Principal Chanler Buck said. “And that’s exactly what she did. So she’s really reestablished something that’s been historic for Powell Middle School.”

In December the program completed its comeback. The Powell team competed against more than 50 other groups and won grand champion. 

“They just took it and ran,” Carter said. 

The team, Rapid Unscheduled Delivery and made up of Carter Krueger, Colson Sherman, Arthur Crawford, Kate Gunn and Noah Adams, competed in four categories. 

First they designed their robot. Then they took the robot and put it on a map, having had to precode to accomplish the different challenges required of the robot. The theme of the year was archaeology, so the students had to talk to archaeologists from around the country with the aim of finding ways to improve the work. 

“They took that and then they built a giant structure, because they could,” Carter said. 

Finally, the team was graded in their core values, such as how the students work together, survive challenges and cheer others around them. 

And they just nailed all of it,” she said, noting they were good in all of the categories and stayed resilient. 

The team name may say it best.

“It means that when something goes wrong, when you see the robots start to fall apart or something, that it means that we’re OK with it and that we can roll with the punches and do whatever we can,” Sherman said.