Caleb Basse and Dutton Webb make a powerful robot manufacturing team.
On Oct. 24, the teens won first place in the San Antonio Boosting Engineering Science and Technology, or SA BEST competition at Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio. They will advance to the state competition on Dec. 4 and 5 at the University of North Texas in Denton.
For taking first place, they received one four-year, $50,000 scholarship to Saint Mary’s University, which they decided Webb would take. Webb plans to study engineering.
The competition challenges the students to build and design remote-controlled robots out of raw materials. They do this in six weeks, from a box of approved raw materials.
Each robot is given a specific task to accomplish.
The task of the robot is kept secret from the teams until close to the day of the competition.
This year, the teams had to complete chemical equations, with different elements represented by various items. For instance, a tennis ball could be carbon, tennis shoe hydrogen, and they had to control the robots to pick up the items and place them in an area called “the scoring field” to construct the equations.
While many schools had teams compete throughout the region, including teams from Canyon High School, Canyon Lake High School and Smithson Valley High School, the New Braunfels home-schooled students were the only team locally to advance, and also one of the smallest.
Basse and Webb are home-schooled, though Webb takes classes at Grace Preparatory Academy. This is their fourth year in the competition.
“I’ve always been into engineering, robots, things like that,” Webb said.
The team’s mentor and coach, Wayne Tschirhart, is a civil engineer for the San Antonio River Authority. He has been working with the New Braunfels home school students for nine years.
“Dutton is probably the leader in design. He likes tinkering,” Tschirhart said. “Caleb is strong in manufacturing. He did a lot of the parts, cutting the gears.”
“Most of it for the competition part has to do with mechanical engineering and game strategy,” Caleb said. “We built the robot at Dutton’s house, and I’d come over and work on it with him,” he said. “Every year it’s been different. It’s an objective-based game.”
