- Timothy Rowher
- The Daily Nonpareil
- March 20, 2025
A student at Iowa School for the Deaf recently showed The Nonpareil how to throw a ball into a small opening.
First, it was one ball, then two balls into two openings — at the same time.
But it wasn’t the student throwing the ball. It was his robot.
Robotics skills like this that is making robotics teams at the school quite a name for themselves. In fact, two teams will be taking on the world next month at an event in Dallas, Texas: the VEX Robotics World Championship.
“It’s the largest robotics competition in the world,” said Cindie Angeroth, communications director at Iowa School for the Deaf.
ISD has VEX robotics teams in middle school and high school, she said. There are two middle school teams this year: Crash Outs and Blue Wolf with both teams having qualified to a national deaf tournament in Georgia early last month.
“That’s a big deal because there are only 16 (middle school) teams that qualify for this,” Angeroth said.
Each team qualified through building its robot, programming it to run a functional code and then doing well in a specific, pre-selected VEX game.
Crash Outs is the team going to the upcoming world championship event, Angeroth said. To get there, a team must qualify through their respective state tournament or a “signature” event like the one in Georgia, she said.
“We had a plan and a strategy and went with that and won,” said Crash Outs member Olajuwon (Oley) Rooney, a seventh-grader, who just recently got involved in robotics.
After qualifying for the world event, Crash Outs competed in the Iowa championships in late February and found success again.
“So, this team qualified for the worlds (competition) twice,” Angeroth said.
Besides Oley, the other members of Crash Outs are seventh-grader Logan Wiesner, and eighth-grader Neil Metteer.
They’re coached by Jen Herzog and Kate Kasal.
“Last year, I was thinking about robotics,” Metteer said. “I wanted to do something different. It was exciting and fun. Building robotics was intriguing.”
“When I was in the fifth grade, I got involved in coding and that’s part of robotics,” Wiesner said.
Frustration can occur during the process of building robotics, Rooney said.
“Until the completion, then it feels good,” he said.
Two of the school’s three high school teams qualified for that Georgia event, Angeroth said.
The three teams are named Spicy Firecat, Flamin’ Spicy Ramen and Supernova Cat, the team that will also be going to Dallas.
Supernova Cat members are seniors Trey Diedrich and Eric Yepez Morales. Herzog and Ashley Villaverde are their coaches.
Diedrich, from Mitchell, South Dakota, has been involved with robotics since the sixth grade.
“Every year, there’s a new game. That makes it more enjoyable, more strategies,” he said.
The three teams are named Spicy Firecat, Flamin’ Spicy Ramen and Supernova Cat, the team that will also be going to Dallas.
Supernova Cat members are seniors Trey Diedrich and Eric Yepez Morales. Herzog and Ashley Villaverde are their coaches.
Diedrich, from Mitchell, South Dakota, has been involved with robotics since the sixth grade.
“Every year, there’s a new game. That makes it more enjoyable, more strategies,” he said.
“The VEX Robotics teams are putting ISD on the map, as there were only 32 teams invited to Georgia and ISD had four of those teams,” Angeroth said. “So, that says a lot about the leadership of the coaches and the motivation of the students to go head-to-head with their STEM skills. Having two teams go to the worlds will set a new bar for ISD’s future teams and encourage our younger students to be excited about STEM, too.”
