Robots clashed in a battle of wits Saturday with 24 high schools competing to create the best robot for the annual Kansas BEST Gatekeeper competition hosted by Wichita State’s College of Engineering at Hartman Arena.

The competition was complete with cheerleaders, referees and energetic mascots, but was very different from other high school sports.

The contest required each team to create a robot that could construct a simulated central processing unit by collecting “gates” and “transistors” made out of clothes hangers and plywood and putting them together in the correct order in the competition area.

Although the teams consisted of high school students from all over the state, event organizers and volunteers represented WSU. WSU computer science major Robin Jacobs was one of those volunteering as a referee.

“The goal is to get them to apply their mathematics and their science skills to build something that will accomplish a task,” Jacobs said. “It’s essentially engineering skills encouragement.”

Besides using engineering skills, Jacobs said the students would have to communicate more than in past years. This is because the roles of the two team members in charge of controlling the robot during the round have changed.

Usually, there is a driver who operates the actual motor functions of the robot and a spotter who tells the driver how he needs to move the robot around the competition area.

This year, the spotter had a lot of control over the robot’s movement via a crane-like instrument that maneuvered the robot through its lateral space.

“It takes a lot more strategy and communication than they’re used to,” Jacobs said.

The event also brought in a presentation aspect and a “notebook” aspect to the competition to further stress the importance of communication and documentation for the student engineers.

The notebook is where the students document everything they do with their robots. According to the director of engineering education, WSU professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and the emcee of the event, Lawrence Whitman, this helps students realize what engineers have to do as a part of their jobs.

“Engineers really have to document what they do,” Whitman said. “This teaches them the importance of documentation.”

Although most of the schools competing came from the Wichita area, some schools traveled from much further away. Garden City robotics team instructor Yuriy Drubinskiy said it was worth the more than three-hour drive.

“It makes the stuff that you’re doing in class so much more relevant,” Drubinskiy said. “I feel like as a small town in western Kansas, to come out here and compete is a really great experience.”

It was Garden City’s first year competing. Even though they didn’t place, Garden City sophomore Adrian Longoria described the event as “insane.”

“It’s a fun event,” Whitman said. “What’s more fun than robots?”