The Pella Robotics Team, known as the Bionic Dutch, has just started their 2023-2024 competition season. The team is made up of ten students from Pella High School. They are competing in the Des Moines Metro League.

This year’s competition is called Centerstage. In this competition, students are challenged to build a robot to perform various tasks throughout a match. These tasks include taking objects, which are called pixels, from one side of the field to the other and placing them on an angled board. However in order to cross the field, you have to navigate through a frame structure. Other tasks include parking in specific locations, launching a paper airplane into a specific zone, and hanging from the frame structure. Teams earn various amounts of points based on each task, and some tasks are worth different amounts of points based on how well a team performs the task.

A match is comprised of two alliances that compete to score the most points in the allotted time.  Each match is two minutes and 30 seconds, 30 seconds for Autonomous and two minutes for Teleop and End Game. End Game is the last 30 seconds of Teleop. An alliance consists of two teams working together to score points with their robots.

This last weekend on Saturday, Nov. 4, the Bionic Dutch competed in their first event of this season. At this event, the team won 5 of their 6 matches and placed 2nd of 22 teams. The team says that this is a spectacular start to their 2023-2024 season.