During the 2015-16 school year teacher, Bryce Borland, founded the STEM program at the middle school. If you don’t know what the STEM program is, it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and focuses on how those things play a crucial role in our current and future world.

The STEM program inspired a group of teenagers to join the FIRST Tech Challenge, where they are challenged to design, build and operate robots. FIRST is a non-profit organization that puts together mentor-based robotics program for kindergarten through high schoolers.

Borland put together Yamhill-Carlton’s first team of middle schoolers, who have since stuck together and have brought it to the high school. Their current team consists of Osian Leahy, Grace Armstrong, Morgan Padberg, Claire Padberg, Matthew Heston, Dominic Harris, Cristin Brethower and new, current coach Joe Padberg.

They build a robot, that completes that years challenge, and then they perform tasks at a tournament. At these tournaments they must complete tasks and each task has a point value. Their season begins in September, and lasts until end of January.

They currently are in their off season and continue to compete in a couple tournaments. Their most recent tournament was February 11th. Team member Cristin Brethower talked about how the tournament went, “This year, we advanced from qualifying, the first level of competition, to the super qualifying level, which is the best we have done. We won the “Think” award for our engineering section that emphasizes our robot design and progression, and this put us in a position to qualify. We are extremely proud of this accomplishment and are eager to pursue more awards in the future,”  

The team must raise their own money. They use their own money, receive grants, sponsorships, and donations. During their off season they focus a lot on raising money, advertising to the community and meeting with other teams.

They typically meet 2-4 times a week. If you are interested in becoming a part of the team they need people who are willing to take notes, outreach, building, programming and driving. You can talk to Cristin or Mr. Slavish about joining.