The sound of power tools rings through the halls as the once unrecognizable pile of supplies turns into a new machine. It comes to life as this unordinary class stands over and watches, looking for anything that may go wrong.

“Each individual student has to dedicate themselves to the process of engineering to make it all come together,” public relations officer Tyler Smith said.

The robotics team has grouped up to assemble a robot, write a 50-page manual on all of its operations, design hard hats and T-shirts and even shoot a YouTube video. They even gained public awareness by showing their well designed robot at the mall, taking it to the intermediate, elementary and primary schools, and creating a booth to display said robot.

“Working with ‘BEST’ is hard for a teacher, because you can’t help,” Stacy Gwartney said. “Me, being a type-A personality kind of person, makes it harder, because if something goes wrong I want to jump in and fix it myself.”

The two classes are a mix of juniors and seniors. Boost Engineering, Science and Technology (BEST), helps students understand responsibility and it creates situations in which the students have to rely on each other for help and to finish their assigned tasks to create the robot.

While being timed, it had to complete certain tasks such as picking up objects like a tennis ball, a racket ball, a beach ball and a can of tomato paste.

“As a teacher I highly recommend this kind of program,” Gwartney said. “They walk away with pride in what they’ve accomplished.”

The students traveled to the University of Texas in Dallas on Oct. 24 for the robotics competition.

They received points for many things, such as community awareness, which they got by taking it to the mall, elementary schools and primary schools. The Web site that the team created placed first out of 26, and their notebook took fourth place. They moved to the semi-finals and their robot placed eighth.

“I’ve seen groups that almost cried when their robots didn’t make it, but they instead turned around and cheered on others,” Gwartney said.